It was a simple setup — two pencils, a 9-volt battery and a beaker of salt water. But it worked, and that was all the encouragement Miklya Khan needed to dream of her next big experiment.
“It’d be a good source of energy,” said Khan, a freshman at the School of Leadership at South Shore High School. “It might be something people can use in the future. If we need more energy, I can say ‘Here’s my idea,’ and we can use that for the whole Earth worldwide.”
Khan, 15, was one of about 300 students assembled at the Museum of Science and Industry for the 58th annual Chicago Public Schools Student Science Fair. Many participants, who ranged from 7th grade to 12th, came with similar dreams of applying science to benefit the world at large, or at least to understand their own small corner of it.
Though there were no baking-soda volcanoes in sight — the fair’s spoilsport safety requirements banned the use of chemicals, heating devices and lasers — posters bristled with creativity and insight, holding everything from horror movie music to aerospace stealth technology up for inquiry.
The 303 students represented the best of the city, having already won top awards in competitions of more than 10,000 students, said Angela Dumas, the citywide science fair coordinator. Fifty students will be chosen to go to the Illinois state competition in May, while many more will receive special awards and scholarships.
On display to the public through Sunday, the posters test a wide range of scientific questions, from Richards Career Academy High School sophomore Tania Guzman’s “Can an iPod be Charged Using Common Items?,” which attempted (but failed) to power the device with a Gatorade-soaked onion, to Lincoln Park junior Terrence George’s experiments on how to grow corn on the moon.
“In a perfect world, I’d be an astrobiologist,” George, 16, said, detailing how he constructed an improved vacuum chamber for his experiment after the first one “imploded.”
Some students, like Karolina Wypyszewska, an 18-year-old senior at Lincoln Park High School, had been pursuing projects for multiple years. Her experiments into using caffeine as a potentially eco-friendly pesticide — this year tested its effects upon reproduction and mortality in more than 2000 fruit flies — had brought her to the city fair for three of her four years in high school.
Many of the projects dealt with issues of environmental health and water pollution, including Hyde Park senior Steven Kirk’s fieldwork on insect life in southern Illinois streams, and Curie junior Erik Zuniga, whose chemistry experiment looked to neutralize a pollutant commonly found near steel mills.
Dumas said she was thrilled that so many students were focusing their attention on the environment.
“It’s wonderful,” she said. “If those are the questions occurring to kids and they have the opportunity to test it themselves then, oh my gosh, I’m not so worried about global warming.”
For many students, just getting to the science fair was an accomplishment. William Bailey, a 17-year-old junior at the Chicago Vocational Career Academy, presented “Can Water Float on Water?” from a wheelchair, after his leg was fractured in a hit-and-run accident Wednesday. Khan and two other students from South Shore School of Leadership were the first representatives from the South Side school in more than 10 years, said science teacher Denise Harris.
“They have so many distractions,” a proud Harris said of her students. “But the more they do this, the more they feel like they’re blending in. They need this.”
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IN THE WEB EDITION
To see video from the Chicago Public Schools Student Science Fair go to chicagotribune.com/sciencefair.
rmitchum@tribune.com
