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Fairfield youth compete in Junior State Science Fair
Southeast Iowa Union offers audio versions of articles using Instaread. Some words may be mispronounced.
FAIRFIELD – Fairfield is sending a team of youngsters to compete in the inaugural Junior State Science and Technology Fair of Iowa.
Fairfield’s team includes six kids in grades third through fifth who have prepared a science project to present at The Children’s Museum in Coralville on Monday, Feb. 17, one of four locations to host the state contest. To prepare for their big day, the youth showed off their projects during an open house at the Fairfield Public Library on Thursday, Feb. 13.
Antariksha Sharma is a high school student at Maharishi School, and is a member of the Student Advisory Board for the State Science and Technology Fair. She was among the first to learn that the state science fair was adding a junior division this year, and began asking around to see if any local science teachers wanted to field a team.
“Teachers had so much on their plate already, but we still really wanted to do this,” Sharma said. “We reached out to the public library and created a club instead.”
Fairfield’s STEAM Club (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) has been meeting weekly at the library since November. To help each child decide on a project, they were given a huge database of science projects other students had done.
“We spent two or three weeks talking about project ideas and how we could refine them,” Sharma said. “This is all based on their own interest, and it’s culminated into something they can do.”
This process helped the students zero-in on a particular field they wanted to study, and then each child created an experiment to test their hypothesis.
For instance, 8-year-old Yug Ghimiray wanted to study the effect of drag on airplanes. He did this by creating different types of paper airplanes, and then testing how long each one could stay in the air and how far it could fly. He made five styles of airplanes, and tested each one 10 times, collecting data on every flight. He determined that the style of paper airplane that resembles a jet flew the farthest.
Eleven-year-old Ace Bar-Shimon designed an experiment to test the effectiveness of different sizes of parachutes, and learned that bigger parachutes are better because they create more drag. Bar-Shimon tested the parachutes by attaching them to a weight and dropping them from the second story of a building.
Nine-year-old George Engel-Foley created a miniature Maglev train, a train that levitates above its track using magnets. He used magnetic tape for his magnets, and his experiment explored how much adding weight to a Maglev train decreased the distance between the train and the track.
Sharma and her mother, Asha Sharma, a science teacher at Maharishi School, are the advisors to the club, which is open to students in any school district and to home-schooled students. They have received a helping hand from Youth Services Librarian Sara Martindale and retired science teacher Kathy Estrada.
“Sara was so wonderful, helping us advertise this and put it all together,” Antariksha said. “We’ve got a good team going.”
Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com
