On the morning of March 6, nearly 200 science-minded southeast Iowa students gathered at Southeastern Community College’s West Burlington campus for the Southeast Iowa Super Conference Science Fair.
Among them were eight sixth-graders from Aldo Leopold Intermediate School.
“I’m proud of them,” Extended Learning teacher Kahri Plein said as her students set up displays laying out their hypotheses, scientific processes and results. “This is their first go at having judges talk to them and having to explain their projects to judges.”
Aldo student participation in the science fair was voluntary, and the students who opted to compete had spent the preceding weeks working either individually or in pairs to design and execute their projects.
Sixth-grader Leighana Lewis’s project examined which bridge structures are best suited to withstand earthquakes. She first became interested in the geological phenomenon after learning about them at school. Her experiment was further inspired by a STEM project in which students constructed bridges out of toothpicks and marshmallows.
She used those same materials to build three model bridge types: an arch bridge, a truss bridge and a beam bridge. She then used a laundry basket, cardboard, binder clips and rubber bands to construct a shake table.
Once placed on the shake table, each bridge endured one minute of shaking. Lewis judged their durability by the number of pieces the bridges broke into. Her results, she said, were surprising.
“I found out that the beam bridge would be the strongest because it only broke into two pieces,” Lewis said. “I thought the truss bridge would have won because it has so many triangles, and through research, I found that triangles are the strongest shape to use in a bridge. I figured that one would have won since it had the most, but it actually ended up being one of the ones that broke the most.”
She believes the beam bridge fared best because it had the fewest number of pieces, thus having the least opportunities to break.
Nearby, Tuscany Sparrow and Claire Lafferty, a pair of Lewis’s classmates, stood alongside their display board reviewing how they would present their project to judges.
“This is called ‘Project Bubble’ because it’s about how you can blow the biggest bubble with different types of bubble gum,” Sparrow said.
“So we were trying to see which bubble gum would produce the biggest bubble,” Lafferty added.
The two examined five different types of bubble gum. Each was chewed exactly 100 times before a bubble was blown.
“One-hundred chews was a really good amount to have it chewed just right,” Sparrow said.
“We tried 50, but it wasn’t enough,” Lafferty explained.
While one blew a bubble, the other used a ruler to measure it. They logged the measurements and took pictures of the ruler alongside each bubble to ensure accuracy. Their results supported what they had learned through their research, which is that higher sugar content allows for larger bubbles.
In another crowded classroom within SCC’s Hall of Sciences, sixth-graders Avery Blodgett and Luna Perez-Hall were ready to present the findings of their project, “Determining the Difference of Electricity Generated by Lemons.”
Using pennies and nails for battery electrodes, their project compared the amount of electricity produced by three lemons to the amount of electricity produced by six lemons, with the hypothesis being that more lemons would mean more electricity. That hypothesis was correct, but only partially.
“Our hypothesis was that the six lemons would produce around, like, 2.85 more volts than three lemons, but it actually produced a little bit less,” Blodgett said, explaining the multimeter showed a difference of only 1.809 volts.
Another Aldo duo, Austyn Deuitch and Avery Irish, examined whether people could determine the difference between real and artificial scents.
“At first, we did some research on how scents are made, and then we chose five scents to do over the course of five days,” Deuitch said. “We did lemon, vanilla, strawberry, orange and cinnamon.”
“And then we had people in our class smell them once every day,” Irish explained.
The source of the scents were placed in tupperware containers, and student subjects were blindfolded before smelling each scent.
They found the ability to distinguish between real and artificial scents depended both on the individual and the person, with orange being the easiest to identify.
Aila Plein’s project, “Music: Helpful or Distracting?” was inspired by observations made at school. Some teachers allow students to listen to earbuds while doing work while others do not. She knew classical music to be correlated with improved focus, but she wondered if lyrical music would have a different effect.
To test this, participants took two math tests — one without music playing and another with music playing at 69.7 decibels.
“My hypothesis was that if lyrical music is played while a math test is being taken, then the time it takes for subjects to finish will increase and their scores will be decreased,” Plein said.
Participants did not know that they were being timed.
She was surprised by the results. Of the 10 subjects, four scored higher on the test when the music was played and four scored lower. The other two participants’ scores did not appear to be affected by whether music was played. Furthermore, almost every participant took about the same amount of time to complete the test.
Based upon her results, Plein said she could not recommend one way or the other whether lyrical music is a help or hindrance to school work.
While waiting for judges to announce the results, the science fair participants gathered in SCC’s gymnasium for lunch and an impromptu dance. Ultimately, Deuitch and Irish received an Aspiring Excellence Award.
