8th Grade Science Fair Interviews
by Andi Villamor
Congratulations to all the 8th Grade Winners!
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1st Place: Ione McLain (How Does Air Quality…?)
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2nd Place: Evan Goodman and Simon Oshev (Chill Pill)
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2nd Place: Max Pestes and Isaac Sapire (Removing Microplastics from Water)
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3rd Place: Collin Lee and Roy Li (The Wind Turbine Showdown)
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Honorable Mention: Margaux Lane (Measuring the Strength of I-beam Types)
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Honorable Mention: Hasmik Yedoyan and Tanvi Chandrashekhar (The Effect of Saturation on the Perception of the Image)
Simon Oshev and Evan Goodman (2nd place winners)
What is the title of your project? Chill Pill
What was your project about? It’s a solar-powered solution for medication storage for the unhoused.
Why did you choose this project? We saw that homelessness is a big problem in Los Angeles, and I take allergy medication, so it made me think about how the unhoused are unable to store medication if they have allergies like me or other health issues.
What did you use to make the storage system? We used a thermoelectric module, which uses two different types of semiconductors to cool one side of the device and heat the other side, and we added heat sinks and fans to carry the cool air out.
How did you determine your design for the storage? We looked at [factors like] portability, low cost, and simplicity.
What was the biggest challenge you faced? It was kind of the team aspect, like finding the right times [to work on the project together].
If you did this project again, what would you do differently? The problem is the efficiency. Basically, after one hour, the temperature goes down to about 50 degrees and it shuts off because we set the battery so that there’s a discharge limit to make it safer. So in order to fix that, we would have to add a temperature-sensing circuit breaker so that when it gets cool enough, it turns off, and once it gets hot enough, it turns back on.
What would be the next steps for the project if you wanted to partner with an organization and implement it on a larger scale? Make it more user-friendly because it’s kind of difficult to learn how to use it. [We would also make it] sturdier and more durable. By sturdier, I mean safer to the elements, like making it waterproof.
Margaux Lane (Honorable mention)
What was the title of your project? Measuring the Strength of Different I-Beams
What was your hypothesis? The beam that is thickest in the middle would be the strongest, and it was. [If a beam has a greater thickness in the middle, then it will have a lower distance displacement after the addition of weights].
How did you do the experiment? I used yard sticks and wood glue, and I made these long wooden beams [of different thicknesses] and put weights on the ends to see how much they would bend. [To measure that,] I clamped one end of the beam to a table and I measured its distance to the ground before I put the weight on it and then I put the weight on and measured that distance, then calculated the displacement – so the ones with the least displacement [bent the least and were therefore] the strongest.
Why did you choose this project? I chose it because I thought it would be interesting to see which models would be the strongest.
What application do you think your project could have? The project could be applied to construction and creating stronger infrastructure.
What was the biggest challenge you faced? The biggest challenge was probably while I was testing it, just getting the measurements accurate and making sure they were bending the right way. Some of them broke at the end.
If you did this project again, what would you do differently? I would probably make [the beams] stronger and test them with more weights.
Tanvi Chandrashekar & Hasmik Yedoyan (Honorable mention)
What was the title of your project? How Does Saturation Affect the Perception of an Image?
What was your hypothesis? If the saturation of an image is between 50-75 chroma level, then people will gravitate towards it more.
How did you do the experiment? We got eighty people to take a survey with thirty images, and each of them were saturated to a different level. They then [rated] which images they liked the most and we analyzed the data with graphs and came to the conclusion that people like images with a chroma level of 50-75.
Why do you think this level of saturation is the most appealing? It makes the pictures more vibrant so that they’re more attention-grabbing, but not so vibrant that it makes them look less natural.
Why did you choose this project? We wanted to do something color-related, and apparently doing color was really hard because we had to learn about the color scale [and other aspects of color theory], so we just chose saturation.
What was the biggest challenge you faced? Mainly just trying to analyze the graphs since there was so much data.
If you could do this project again, what would you do differently? We would do a smaller test group, because eighty was a lot, and it was really hard.
Congratulations also to the High School Winners!
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Naira Badalyan (9th) (Using Microchannel Heat Sinks to Enhance Cooling of Solar Cells and Increase Power Output)
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Ryan Lee (10th) (Modeling the Atlantic Maritime Trade with Physarum Polycephalum Slime Molds)
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Geonhee Lee (10th) & Harshini Manikandan (10th) (How does the Aspect Ratio of the Wing of the Aircraft Correspond to the Lift and Drag Ratio)
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Valeri Petrosyan (9th) (The Simulation and Use of Reinforcement Learning AI for Path Generation of Target-Seeking Munition)
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Xavier Rowe (10th) (Testing the Methane Yield of Different Food Groups)