Science fair winners explore atypical, but personal, subjects

MILFORD — If someone says middle school science fair, papier mâché volcanoes and potato energized light bulbs may instantly come to mind. However, the sixth, seventh and eighth grade students who participated in this year’s Dingman-Delaware Middle School Science Fair applied the scientific method to explore some atypical subjects in addition to the more traditional ones. Project topics included solar vs. wind power, the impact of height on self-esteem, animal behavior and many more.
“The caliber of work was astonishing,” said head judge and honors science teacher Mrs. Gina McCarthy. “We had a very difficult time determining our first, second, and third place finishers. All students worked very hard and abided by all necessary criteria."
Those criteria required that variables were identified and understood, the hypothesis was testable, and the procedure was reproducible.
Returning participant and third-place winner Alice Cauchi studied the more traditional science topic of solar vs wind power.
“It took my dad and I eight hours to build a wind turbine out of Plexiglas, conduit pipe, a fan, and a lot of electrical stuff,” Alice said.
They connected the wind turbine and a solar panel to two dead car batteries of the same voltage. After charging the batteries for six hours, Alice tested each with a voltmeter and found that the solar energy source worked best.
Second-place winner Kaleigh Kuddar conducted an atypical study on the readability of font colors.
“I wear glasses,” Kaleigh said. "So I thought I should study something that would help me read at a distance.”
Her results indicated that blue font — as opposed to black, red, or yellow — on a white background was easiest for the eyes to discern.
“My Grandma is an artist, and she wasn’t surprised by the result,” Kaleigh said. “She said that most artists know that blue is easier on the eyes and contrasts well with other colors.”
First-place winners Jore Bagdonas and Hannah Williams studied phonology and phonetics — a personally meaningful but an atypical science choice more closely aligned to a linguistic thesis. Their hypothesis stated that they could predict where a person comes from based on how they pronounced a list of five words: vase, Florida, Nevada, asterisk, and prescription. These words are pronounced different across different Anglophone regions both in the U.S. and around the world.
“We tested it out on the judges as a part of our presentation, and it worked with them too,” Jore said. “I’ve always been curious about my own language development."
Jore, who is Lithuanian but born in America, was raised bilingual.
“I speak English with no accent, but I speak Lithuanian with an American accent even though I was raised speaking Lithuanian at home," she said.
While many of the students at this age level are unsure what they will choose to do for future careers, this academic competition showed that many are learning the skills they need to be successful thinkers in any field. It showed that students have come to understand that the scientific method is applicable in any research area.
“The science fair was a great success,” McCarthy said of the PTA sponsored event. “Our hope is that next year we will have more students presenting at the same caliber as this year.”