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Young and Curious: Santa Cruz County Kids Put Their Scientific Skills to the Test

Area youth compete in the 25th Annual Santa Cruz County Science Fair.

Budding brilliance was in the air Saturday at the fairgrounds in Watsonville, when Santa Cruz County area youth displayed hypotheses and answers at the 25th Annual Santa Cruz County Science Fair, sponsored by Seagate.

More than 400 students from around the county represented 50 area schools at the fair from grades kindergarten through 12. Each of these students advanced to the county level competition after they were chosen as finalists at their local school’s science fair.

They competed in four divisions. The primary division was for grades kindergarten through third. The elementary division was grades four and five. The junior division was made up of middle schoolers in grades six through eight, and the senior division was for high school freshman through seniors.

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Competitors at the junior and senior divisions are eligible to advance to the California State Science Fair on May 2-3.

Judges were on hand to determine who will move ahead.

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Steve Knapp, a Silicon Valley engineer, has judged the county science fair for three years.

“I’ve been a nerd all my life,” he joked. “I’ve just always wanted to give back. They never had science fair when I was a kid. This is my way of getting involved.”

He admitted that he is impressed by some of the projects he has seen at this years’ competition.

“There are middle-school kids doing college-level work, and some high schoolers are working at the graduate level. It’s pretty amazing,” he said.

Haley Loehde-Woolard is one of those amazing young minds. She lives in Scotts Valley and is an eighth-grader at Mission Hill Middle School in Santa Cruz. Loehde-Woolard is using her love of chemistry to make an impact on the world and our environment.

Using a solution she created for last year’s science fair, Loehde-Woolard converted paper in cellulose ethanol.

“The DOE [Department of Energy] has set a standard that ethanol must be ready and available for use for $1.07 a gallon by 2012, so we really need to get this under way," Loehde-Woolard said. "This could help bring the next generation into now. It could help us create all of the net neutral fuels that we need. We can stop paying for overseas oil.  We can stop polluting our atmosphere and we can keep the money within our own economy. That would greatly help society."

Equally impressive was Abe Karplus, a Santa Cruz High freshman. Karplus created an electrical-circuit analyzer program that can calculate currents and voltage for a circuit. He has participated in science fairs since he was in fourth grade and plans to go as far as he can.  

“I always like doing a math software category project," he said. "I really like programming and I’m also interested in physics. I definitely intend to go into programming or computer science.” 

Other projects were inspired from more home-spun ideas, like the one from Diego Bernall, a sixth grader at Good Shepherd Catholic School in Mid County.

“I answered the question, whether a bathtub or shower would use more water,” Bernall said.

He used his family members to time their shower times and calculated the amount of water usage. He then compared those figures to the amount of water a standard bathtub would hold.

Bernall says he thought a shower would use more water. He was surprised to learn that not only was his hypothesis wrong, but he actually discovered more than he set out for.

“I just wanted to know which one would use more, but I ended up learning about the cost of water and how much we could save,” he says. “So now we’ve made the change, and it will definitely affect our water bill.”

Max Meltzer, a sixth-grader at Orchard School in Aptos, was inspired by his mom’s Valentine roses.

“Her flowers kept dying, so I wanted to find out which solution preserves fresh-cut roses for the longest period of time,” explained Meltzer.

Testing four different solutions, including aspirin, bleach, plain water and a premade preservative packet, for eight days, he found that plain water was the best choice.

This was a Meltzer’s first year competing at this level. “I was pretty nervous at first, but after the first judge came around, I was like ‘Oh, it’s not as hard as I thought,’ ” he said.

Meltzer enjoyed the process enough that he hopes to compete again next year.

Haley Loehde-Woolard’s mother, Glenna, has three other children who compete in the science fair. She said she likes how learning the scientific method can instill intrinsic interest for her children.

“They have ownership of a project," she said. "They take it from beginning to completion, and it’s something that they can call their own. The rest of their school skills tend to follow suit. They understand that any project, whether it’s a school book report or what, they have to establish a procedure.”

Her daughter, Haley, agreed.

“There’s only so much a textbook can teach.  So when you go in and do it yourself, there’s so much more you can learn,” she said.

Winners for the Santa Cruz County Science Fair will be posted on the science fair website no later than 5 p.m. Tuesday.

An awards ceremony will take place at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on March 21.

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