The seventh annual Canadian Rockies Science Fair will be held at Lawrence Grassi Middle School in Canmore on Tuesday (March 18) and attendees may see tomorrow’s generation of scientists and engineers as they test and question things such as yogurt expiry dates, who has the best battery and what is cellphone usage doing to your body?
“Kids can do an experiment, they can do an innovation or a study and the thing about the science fair is they can do any topic they want as long as it’s appropriate,” Banff Community High School science teacher Shari Worobey said. “They cannot do anything involving ingesting energy drinks, that’s a concept that’s been banned all across Canada with science fairs. As well, they can’t harm animals or people, so there are general ethics that are involved.”
A huge variety of experiments are going to be on display, with six different scientific categories and close to 170 projects this year being presented by over 200 students.
The three schools participating are Lawrence Grassi Middle School, Banff Community High School and Banff Elementary School. The categories include health and life sciences, environmental science, physics and engineering, chemistry, sociological and psychological science.
“There’s tons of prizes this year as well. The Canmore Rotary Club is a huge sponsor and Bow Valley Basics has pulled through and donated prizes,” said Worobey. “We have about 50 specific prizes and then in each science category the top three get a medal.
“There is also the Canada-Wide Science Fair, which is always the second week in May, and this year it’s in Windsor, Ont., so we’re hoping to have a couple of students win and go on to that.”
BCHS Grade 9 student Victoria Kennedy’s project puts the topics of health and cellphones under scrutiny. “I’m looking at how cellphone use affects your health. Cellphones emit non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, and there’s been speculation as to whether it is safe or not,” Kennedy said. “I’ve been working on that and found some really scary stuff. I like studying cause and effect and things that are relevant.”
“We’re testing the expiry dates on yogurt. We got different yogurt with different expiries,” said Grade 9 student Seamus O’Farrell. “We tested one that’s expired already and one that’s not, and we’re testing the mold found on both to find out if the mold on the one that was expired grew before the one not expired.”
Student Andre Lapierre was inspired by family fishing trips and decided to put his personal curiosity to good use for his science project. “I’m testing the water drainage from the storm drains and how they flow right into the Bow River and if it’s affecting the water life in the river,” Lapierre said. “Once one thing changes, everything changes and it’s just been building up lately and with the floods, everything will go into the sewers and then straight out.”
“I created a mechanism where I connected a clock to a battery and a flashlight and soldered the clock, battery and flashlight and we would test different batteries to see how much energy they would give off,” Grade 9 student Duncan Thorburn said.
No animals or students were tested upon, or forced to ingest energy drinks during the writing of this article.
