H.S. Science Fair: "Fecal Coliform in Tanning Beds."

[Editor-in-Chief]

This tourney all about brains

State science fair courts knowledge, bounces ideas

By DAN EGAN
degan@journalsentinel.com

Posted: March 17, 2007

It's March. Tournament time.

Time for high school students to match their talents against the best in the state.

But there were no bands or raging fans or cheerleaders at the competition held at Marquette University on Saturday.

The Badger State Science and Engineering Fair is a decidedly more low-keyed affair, but organizers say the stakes here might be higher than the much better attended state high school basketball championships that were under way in Madison Saturday.

"China is graduating 50,000 engineers a year, and the U.S. is graduating 5,000," said Gary Stresman, Nicolet High School teacher and the science and engineering fair executive director. "You tell me which is more important - being able to produce a basketball team or a quality engineer that the world needs."

Categories judged Saturday included biology, engineering, medical/health and behavioral/social sciences.

There were about 100 exhibits on display at the daylong competition, and they included not a single better mousetrap or smoldering volcano or intricate bridges built out of spaghetti.

There were lots of posters detailing research projects with impressive titles such as "Bypassing Replicative Senescence in Primary Mouse Mammary Tumor Cells with Viral Oncogenes," or "Determining Carbon Nanotube Solubility: The Missing Link to a Practical Supermaterial?"

Others research projects explored less arcane fare. There was: "Are your hands really clean?" which detailed the effectiveness of anti-bacterial soap. Another project was titled: "Fecal Coliform in Tanning Beds."

The tanning bed study was conducted by two 16-year-olds who had the distinction of traveling the farthest Saturday to present their research, from Cochrane-Fountain City High School on the far west side of the state. They said they picked the topic because they were interested in learning how dirty a public place can be.

"We were either going to do the bathrooms at school or tanning beds, and we figured we'd use tanning beds because it's more relevant," said study co-author and avid tanning booth customer, Brittany Schabacker. "I don't like using the bathrooms at school. They're gross."

She and her partner Kayla Bauer were relieved to find the tanning booths were clean. They said staff wiping them down likely had something to do it. So did all the UV light.

"What's really interesting to me is there are two kinds of projects," said science and engineering fair judge Hershel Raff. "Some are mentored, where students work with a mentor and it's very sophisticated. And others are kids who do it all by themselves, and it's really not that sophisticated."

Those are the ones that often turn on Raff, a professor of medicine and physiology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Wauwatosa.

He said the point of the competition isn't necessarily the knowledge the projects produce. It's the chance to get kids to stretch their minds in ways they never have.

"You learn the discipline of science," he said. "How to organize your thoughts. How to think critically."

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[solarmeter®]

Every year 4 or 5 parents by UV meters for their kid's science fair projects.

Usually they test transmission through various clothes and eyewears.

Glad this one found the acrylics squeeky clean. Must have been Lonn's Lucasol... haha.

http://www.m-ms.com/