New Haven Independent

This year’s is the New Haven Public Schools’ (NHPS) largest and most sophisticated science fair. Having been winnowed from the work of 8,000 students in preliminary competitions, 900 winning exhibitors from physics to biology and from pre-K to 12th grade, by individual and by team, were crowned with laurels (laurus nobilis) and received a host of special prizes Wednesday night.

However, according to Richard Therrien, NHPS’s new K-12 science supervisor, winning is negligible compared to the learning process. “Even the judging is part of the learning process.” Therrien is posing here with the Ping-Pong-A-Leo Thermometer exhibit, an entry by seventh-graders Annie O’Connell (left) and Roslyn Shanklin of the Edgewood Magnet School. (More on this later, as your reporter struggles to understand the experiment.)

“The judges come by yesterday,” he explained Wednesday, “and read the students’ observations and journals without the kids being there. Today they’re here, in a very formal process, but fun, of course, probing to see how deep the understanding is.”

Next year will be the first that New Haven’s fifth and eighth-graders will be tested, on the state’s Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT), in science. Not that people are doing science or science fairs to the test. But the judging process this year asking kids about the relevance of the experiment to society, the environment, the world. “This is one of the new state ‘frameworks’ in science,” Therrien explained, “and it’s one of the new things about the fair this year.”

Here, for example is Jeff Batis, a post-doctoral student in Yale’s psychiatry department who specializes in brain imaging. Batis is judging, that is, probing the understanding of these young scientists, Samantha Baez and Almasi Briggs, seventh and eight graders from the Clemente Leadership Academy. Their project’s formal name is, “The Effectiveness of Various Products at Inhibiting Escherichia ColiK-12.” In layman’s terms: Does Scope or Listerine or some other product do a better job of killing bacteria?

Batis: What was your control?
Samantha: Dilute saline
Batis: And why the control?
Almasi: To compare to other products.
Batis: Why did you choose this bacteria?
Samantha: It was non-pathogenic
Batis: Good, now I see you did experiments with products over three days in a room, at what, about 70 degrees. Did you account for temperature changes on the plates, and in the human body, where the temperature is 90 degrees plus?
Almasi: Well, we think it would work better in the body, with the higher temperature.
Jeff: Okay, what’s the relevance?
Samantha: People should use mouthwash. It works.
Jeff: What changes would you make if you did the experiment again?
Almasi: I’d use other products, acids.

Almasi, who wants to work with animals when he grows up, and Samantha, who wants to be a biologist, confessed to being a little nervous. A touch more so, when another volunteer judge showed up (there are 120 of them), this time a scientist from Apple, Inc. Dominic Rapini asked the kids about their dependent and independent variables and why they used commercially purchased agar plates with bacteria and not some homegrown stuff. These kids did not answer merely that it would have been yucky.

Danielle Dornbier, their science teacher (pictured here in the back with Therrien and Jack Crane, head of the citywide partnership that makes the fair possible), said this was one of her proudest days. “Danielle’s a first-year teacher,” said Therrien, “and she comes to us from Teach for America, and they are doing great things here.” Therrien was eager to show a reporter these young scientists from the Clemente school precisely because it is not one of the city’s highest-performing. He was demonstrating that science, and the scientific method of learning — hypothesis, experiment, observation recording results — goes on throughout the system. “And it is a paradigm to be successful in life whether you grow up to be a scientist or not.”

Okay, now back to the Ping-Pong-A-Leo Thermometer. Therrien loved it because as a kid he was drawn to the thermometer Galileo invented, he likes the game of ping pong and he liked the pun. No one says adults can’t have fun at the science fair too. These kids, Annie and Roslyn, who are second-timers in the fair, had built a thermometer out of various oils, ping pong balls, and sand and tested which oil would be the best, that is, the most buoyant substance to use in their device. They thought baby oil would prove accurate, because it has some alcohol. When they examined a Galileo thermometer (a famous device that measures temperature both inside and out), they smelled a little alcohol. It turned out that olive oil was the best substance. What the kids learned about buoyancy might be useful in building submarines and in the weight belts of SCUBA divers.

This year’s exhibition, the 13th annual, is officially called the Olin-Yale-Bayer-NHPS Science Fair, in recognition of its sponsors. Olin and Bayer have both moved out of the area. So what about years to come without them? Dr. Mark Blosveren (pictured), NHPS’s science supervisor before his retirement (and currently a health and safety consultant to NHPS) and one of the fair’s coordinators said, “It’s sad, but Yale has really stepped forward providing us with judges and mentors.” However he noted that Bayer and Olin had also provided $500,000 during the course of the year for equipment and internships and other programs. That now has to be replaced. “I grew up here, this is hard work, but I love it, and it is so much fun, and we’ll do it..” Then he went off to talk with Llamilex Lopez (on the left) and Georgina Gonzales, fifth-graders from the Columbus Family Academy, about just how worms utilize their tunnels to fertilize and water our soil.