1,300 vie for top prizes at southern Arizona student science fair

March 19, 2007

By hammersmith

[Source: Mary Bustamante and Konstantinos Kalaitzidis, Tucson Citizen] — Forget March Madness — these young Einsteins are preparing for their own competition at the annual Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair. Starting today, more than 1,300 students will swarm the Tucson Convention Center to show off their science experiments in hopes of winning top prizes. Judging is Tuesday and the fair will be open to the public Wednesday through Friday.

Bob Miranda, principal of Billy Lane Lauffer Middle School in Sunnyside Unified School District, is happy to see students taking ideas and information from their everyday lives, posing questions, developing hypotheses and arriving at conclusions and applications. The winner of the school’s science fair, seventh-grader Tim Crain, exemplifies that, he said. Tim’s hypothesis was “Mesquite, Evergreen or Pine: Do Different Types of Wood Pieces Burn Faster or Slower and Hotter or Cooler than Others and Does Density Affect These Two Attributes?” Miranda and Tim are excited to see how the experiment will do at the regional fair.

While competition can be fierce, students say it’s worth it. Such is the case with Reuben Woodruff and Angel Rogers, two 12-year-old sixth-graders at Rogers Elementary in Tucson Unified School District. They took first place at their school’s science fair. “This project awakened in me the fact that science can be fun,” Angel said. “Before, science was just a subject you had to take.” [Note: To read the full article, click here.]