March 25, 2005

1800 high school students compete in sciencepalooza!

About 175 winners honored

By Patrick Dwire
Times Intern

About 1,800 young scientists packed the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds Pavilion on March 12 with their high school science projects, which ranged from testing the effect of egg shampoo on static electricity in hair to simulating social behavior with simple robots.

Fifty-eight high school juniors and seniors (pictured above) as well as sophomores and freshmen (pictured next page) won Albert Einstein Awards, which included a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate for each winner.

At the end of the sixth annual sciencepalooza! Science Fair, open to all East Side Union High School District schools, the Oak Grove High School science department received the grand prize award of $2,500 for the school with the most outstanding projects, winning 20 of the 58 Albert Einstein Awards.

“I think sciencepalooza! is one of the few upbeat stories to be had in education at the moment,” said Heidi Black, a former ESUHSD science teacher and now full-time coordinator of sciencepalooza!, which is co-sponsored by the district and the non-profit Synopsys Outreach Foundation.

“Synopsys has managed to do this in a district struggling financially and with all the obstacles presented by diverse economic levels, native languages and cultural backgrounds. The Synopsys Outreach Foundation and the science teachers of East Side Union HSD have been quietly working miracles,” said Black. “Unfortunately, fully half of these teachers, who went above and beyond for their students this year, received pink slips due to budget cuts.”

The contest
From measuring the earthquake resistance of various building designs to the effects of water pollution on soybeans, the projects covered a wide range of scientific investigation, reflecting the broad curriculum of high school science from grade levels 9 through 12.

Three-panel “story boards” of more than 800 science projects, mostly done in groups of two to three students, were on display at sciencepalooza! 2005. Each project included a summary of an original hypothesis to be tested, the experiment that tested it and the findings. The projects were judged on originality, quality of the research design and understanding of the scientific method.

Enthusiasm filled the air as each team of students prepared to explain their experiment and their findings to two of the approximately 110 volunteer judges who rated the projects. Spread out over about 80 tables, organized by grade level and type of project, pairs of judges evaluated about 16 projects each, and then recommended the most outstanding project in their group.

Each team of judges recommended a project to receive an Albert Einstein Award, which included a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate for each winner, totaling 58 top awards in the competition. Another 116 projects received Galileo Awards for honorable mention, which included a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate for each winner.

“Over the years the number and the quality of the projects has just exploded,” said Greg Brazil, a freshman science teacher at Oak Grove High School, who served as a sciencepalooza! judge several years ago and was back as a judge this year.

“At the freshman level, students are not sure yet if is cool or not to get excited about an academic project,” he continued. “Students I wouldn’t have expected to get engaged showed up with a lot of enthusiasm for their projects.

Sciencepalooza! helps break through the barrier of getting kids excited about a class project.”

Some projects were not without inevitable glitches. Claudia Galvez, a senior from Andrew Hill High School, conducted preliminary DNA analysis on saliva samples to see if people with the same last name were distantly related.

“My project partner left the samples in the testing machine too long, so our data got sort of messed up,” Galvez said.

“But we were able to recover some data, and make some conclusions.”

Project-based learning
Silver Creek High School science teacher Paul Kilkenny also believes in the value of project-based learning provided by sciencepalooza!

“Project-based learning is clearly superior to the ‘drill and practice’ mode encouraged by standardized tests,” Kilkenny said. “The kids really get excited about coming up with their own idea, collecting the data and testing their own hypothesis. Until kids get the opportunity to do real science through experiential learning, many simply do not get engaged. It’s the best way to teach the scientific method.”

ESUHSD freshmen and sophomores were among the 1,800 young scientists packing the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds Pavilion on March 12.

Kilkenney recalled a student in one of his classes two years ago who had some involvement in local gangs, but got very wrapped up with his science project. When it clearly wasn’t “cool” to strive for academic achievement in his peer group, this student came alone to present his project at sciencepalooza! at the Eastridge Mall and got assaulted by other gang members for his trouble.

“This kid risked his own personal safety to get involved with a science project, which says a lot,” said Kilkenney.

History
Synopsys Outreach Found-ation, which co-sponsors sciencepalooza! with ESUHSD, is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting K-12th grade project-based learning in science and technology. With the support of Synopsys, Inc., sciencepalooza! was started in 2000 as a way to boost the confidence of about 250 first-time science fair participants from ESUHSD.

Now in its sixth year, sciencepalooza! is one of the premier events of the district, attracting more than six times the number of students who participated in the original event. ESUHSD students have advanced to the California State Fair and the International Science and Engineering Fair each of the last four years.

Evergreen-area sciencepalooza! winners

Silver Creek High School
Albert Einstein Award winners
Diane Truong, Sandy Thai, Steven Hao, Dien Vo, Joan Khuu, Diane Dang, San Mai, Joanna Alday, Kevin Hoang and Neil Ednacot

Galileo Award winners
Wendy (Nhu) Tran, Jennifer Tran, Dung Nguyen, Kathryn Magno, Preston North, Bryan Manichanh, Alex San, Nga Chung, Helen Tran, Steven Hao, Gabrielle Morris, Christina Braceros, Renee Costas, Brian Huynh, Raymond Wong, Truccey Nguyen-Do, Alben Cheung, Leticia Trejo, Siyun Yao, Vivian Tran, Lan Tran and Christina Vo

Evergreen Valley High School
Albert Einstein Award winners
Newton Chan, Charles Lam, Rajiv Joshi, Jeffrey Tan, Amit Tripathi, Tracy Nguyen, Mrinal Agarwal, Wahid Chowdhury, Gurpreet Sidhu, Paul Diepenbrock, Jaran Williams and Joyce Huang

Galileo Award winners
Punit Patel, Neil Shah, Nam Nguyen, Rishi Shah, Cody Coppernoll, Pauline Del Rosario, Kathie Pham, Dep Tran, Helen Zheng, Anthony Michaiel, Randy Merritt, John Vu, Elisabeth Schubert and Tiffany Quan

Mt. Pleasant High School
Albert Einstein Award winners
Stella Dugall and Jeneba Tarmoh, Christina Botkins, Vanessa Gatihi, Tom Ma, Tien Nguyen and Raymond Diep

Galileo Award winners
Joann Luzon, Clarence Cabong, April Pascua, Tu-Khanh Duong, Lan Liem, Kyle Floersch and Ravdeep Grewal