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Teen Scientists
If
you think today’s young science buffs are building
makeshift volcanoes, think again. They’re researching
the dangers of second-hand smoke, building rockets, and developing
mathematical models for designing safer skyscrapers.
By Justin Hopper
Listening to Brianna Wright talk about
her science experiment with fruit flies, it’s hard
to tell which part was more difficult: being near them, or
being cruel
to them in the name of science.
“
My Dad kept saying, ‘I hope you don’t come back
as a fly,’” says Wright. “I felt so bad
for them!”
When Wright, a 13-year-old
8th grader at Sacred Heart Elementary School in Shadyside,
chose to enter
the Pennsylvania Junior
Academy of Science’s (PJAS) regional science-project
competition, it wasn’t by classroom mandate or parental
edict. In fact, with only four entrants from her science
class, Brianna had to face the ethical and “ick!” factors
of fruit-fly management with very little in-class input.
Instead, her mother, Lillian Wright, turned to someone
she knew could
help: Carnegie Science Center educator Mayada Mansour,
who is program coordinator for the Mission Discovery education
project, a collaboration between the four Carnegie Museums
of Pittsburgh and Hill House Association in Pittsburgh’s
Hill District.
“
PJAS is something kids do completely on their own,” says
Mansour, who acted as Brianna Wright’s mentor on
the project. “Kids are intrinsically motivated to
do science experiments. I just made sure she had the supplies
she needed,
and went through the steps to make her think a little deeper,
to make sure her experiment didn’t have any holes
in it.”
So, for 18 days earlier
this year, the Wright’s
Stanton Heights household played host to a few dozen unlikely
visitors.
Brianna’s fruit flies lived in vials on the Wright’s
kitchen table, some happily whiling away their normal two-week
lifespan, others subjected to daily clouds of cigarette
smoke as Brianna tested the effects of the smoke on their
genetics.
Every day, she used a syringe to draw 10 ml. of smoke from
the end of a lit cigarette and injected it into some of
the vials. The results were as unpleasant as one might
imagine:
The lives of the flies subjected to cigarette smoke were
cut short by days, and some of their offspring genetic
mutations
such as yellowed bodies and deformed wings.
“
So many people in my family smoke cigarettes,” Wright
says, “my grandfather, aunts, and uncles. I wanted
to show that it could affect their genetics, as well as
themselves.” And
while Grandpa hasn’t quit smoking, Wright did take
first place in the PJAS zoology category, which meant a
trip to State
College for the statewide competition in May.
Brianna Wright’s
fruit-fly experiment is just one example of the renaissance
of an old educational stand-by: the science
fair. In an age in which science and math are constantly
bemoaned as slipping through the fingers of America’s
youth, more and more educators see the value in teaching
by real experimentation.
“
Science education is switching from worksheets and definitions
into ‘get dirty and we’ll explain it at the
end,’” says
Mansour. “Science gives kids that ‘woah!’ at
the end if they’re allowed to get messy and conduct
experiments that really connect to their lives.”
And
getting messy in the name of science can lead to bigger
and better things, says Jo Haas, The Henry Buhl, Jr., Director
of Carnegie Science Center. “Time and time again,
we see young people get energized and excited about careers
in
science and technology after being exposed to these types
of informal learning experiences,” she says. “Our
goal is to engage young people and spark their curiosity—and
then explain the scientific concepts behind the experiences.” “007
Kind of Stuff”
Ang Li looks slightly overwhelmed. Standing in a packed club-level
space in Heinz Field on a Friday in late March, Li—a
quiet senior about to graduate from The Ellis School—is
surrounded by a dozen onlookers, from math professors in
elbow-patched tweed jackets to two camouflage-clad buzz cuts
from the U.S. armed forces. “This is amazing,” whispers
one of the soldiers, a 29-year-old Army scientist. “I’m
working on something almost exactly the same as this!”
High-school
senior Ang Li, a first-place winner at this year's Pittsburgh
Regional Science & Engineering Fair at Carnegie Science
Center, knocked the socks off a scientist from the U.S.
Army with her "Application of Music in Cryptography."
At
the Pittsburgh Regional Science & Engineering Fair
(PRS&EF),
an annual competition for area middle- and high-school students
organized by Carnegie Science Center, there are plenty of
projects that make one ask, “How old are you?” Since
1940, the PRS&EF has provided area kids the opportunity
to work within the sciences —from biology and physics
to computer science and robotics—on their own terms,
but with a distinct competitive goal in mind.
And hundreds
do: This year’s fair drew around 700 participants,
shunning the vinegar-and-baking-soda volcano of yore in favor
of projects studying, for example, “The Effects of
Digitalis Purpurea Versus Reservatol on the Heart of Daphnia.” Maybe
most impressively, in the leveling tradition of the sciences,
high school’s rigid class structure falls apart once
each student is standing, salesman-like, in front of his
or her presentation. The popular kids may be more prone to
studying
the pH levels of makeup products, but they’re just
as impressed by their neighbors’ videogame hand-eye
coordination study, “Wanna Play Halo, Dude?” And
just as anxious for the judge’s approval.
But perhaps
no student produces the “you’re only
in high school?!” response more than Ang Li’s “Application
of Music in Cryptography.” Li’s project uses
a computer to translate text into musical rhythms, using
either
Morse code or a randomly-assigned binary code-key system.
It then takes whatever musical melody she inputs—in
one case, Mozart’s Sonata No. 1—and arranges
it into the coded text’s new rhythm. The result is
a ream of sheet music which appears, even to the trained
eye, as nothing
more than a Mozart piano piece, but which actually contains
a coded message: Her exemplary piece appears a benign series
of quarter notes and rests, but actually contains Roger
Bacon’s
quote, “A man is crazy who writes a secret in any
way other than one which will conceal it from the vulgar.” In
addition to the attention of many of the Fair’s judges
and visitors, Li’s project took first place in the
Senior Computer Science/Math category.
Li doubts she’ll
go on to study cryptography; she’s
already taken a summer Intro to Cryptography course at
the University of Pittsburgh and is considering going into
medicine
in college. She figures, though, that there will always
be a part of her interested in music, math, and codes.
“
I like math, but I wanted to apply that knowledge somehow
to the real world,” says Li. “And secret
codes—it’s
such 007 kind of stuff; very exciting!”
But medicine—that’s
real-word stuff.
Competing to Build the Best Mousetrap
Just an aisle away from Li, Steven Florig’s project may
not have placed in the finals of the Science Fair, but the
15-year-old Mount Lebanon High School freshman isn’t
too worried. His “Rocket Nose Cone Drag Analysis” isn’t
just for the competition—it’s part of his everyday
life. He’s built and launched model rockets since he
was six years old, and is now a member of the national Tripoli
Rocketry Association, which helps him build high-powered rockets
from scratch.
“
I got out of building things with kits a few years ago,” says
Florig. “All my electronics and fins are now custom-built,
but I want to start custom-building tubes and nosecones— that’s
what this is for.”
Another project that garnered the
interest of the buzz-cut brigade, Florig’s analysis
won sponsor awards from the Army and Air Force, as well as
from Westinghouse. But more
importantly, perhaps, he’s learned which shapes of
nosecones will work best on his rockets—and it’s
that kind of hands-on experience, spurred by the incentive
of competition,
that seems to keep kids like Steven Florig interested in
science.
“
Competitions provide a stimulus for this kind of project-oriented
thinking,” says David Tomasic, director of the gifted-support
program at Belle Vernon High School. Tomasic should know:
His team of students won the 2005 Rube Goldberg Machine
Contest,
held in December as part of National Engineers Week.
David Tomasic's team from Belle
Vernon High School took first place at last year's
Rube Goldberg competition by using dominos, mousetraps,
and a 15-pound rock to create a machine that could
put toothpaste on a toothbrush.
Named
for the Pulitzer-prize winning illustrator of bizarrely
complex machinery, the contest demands that student teams
design and build multi-step machines to perform simple
tasks. The
2005 challenge: In a minimum of 15 steps, build a machine
that puts toothpaste on a toothbrush. Belle Vernon’s
machine included dominoes, mousetraps, and a 15-pound rock.
“
I use the competition to teach engineering principles,
and one of those is that they must work in teams,” Tomasic
explains. “Not everyone has all the right ideas;
you have to trust other people’s work. We get a lot
of ideas that are too difficult to do, and they have to
ask, ‘will
we get a return on this equal to our work input?’”
Tomasic
sees competitions like the Rube Goldberg, the Pittsburgh
Regional Science Fair, and PJAS as essential to motivating
and exciting kids about science.
“
Competition stimulates thinking,” says Tomasic. “They
can learn what’s out there, what others are doing, and
what’s expected of them.” Real-life Math
Harina Vin had something very personal in mind when she came
up with the idea for a mathematics-based project in this
year’s Regional Science Fair. And unlike some of her
neighbors around Heinz Field that week, Vin hopes to continue
working on her project— not as a hobby or an assignment,
but as a part of her future.
“
My older sister is in medical school in Chicago,” says
Vin, a 16-year-old 10th grader at Franklin Regional High
School. “She’s
moving into a high-rise apartment building, and after 9/11
and everything, I wanted to combine math, which I love, with
evacuation.”
For “Evacuating a Building: A Mathematical
Model,” Vin
created a formula for determining the best way to evacuate
a tall building within the two-hour window she discovered
that fire departments estimate is the time it takes a building’s
structural integrity to fail under massive trauma. Hers is
a formula based on perfect-world circumstances: While using
Pittsburgh’s USX Tower as an example, she tried to
account for some human reactions—panic, slow reaction
time—but
couldn’t include many variables. And that bothers Vin.
“
I’d like to learn more about crowd density and add
that in,” says Vin, whose project came in second
to Li’s
in the Senior Computer Science/Math competition. “How
quickly people can move, bottlenecking at doorways; right
now, I have people moving like robots.”
So Vin has
begun researching crowd dynamics and social forces in order
to refine and improve her formula, which
she’d
like one day to present to a university that can help her
develop a working formula for determining the safest height
and design
of buildings based on their usage.
That such a formula
may not exist already seems reason enough to thank the
regional science fair circuit for keeping
science,
math, and engineering at the forefront of young peoples’ minds—inside
and outside the classroom.
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