Fair to display high school science projects

By Nikolina Hatton

More than a hundred high school students from all over Oregon and southwest Washington will come to an MHCC-hosted regional science fair Feb. 24, and have an opportunity to advance to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair.

Valory Thatcher, an MHCC instructor and the awards coordinator for the fair, said this is the first time MHCC has hosted a fair like this; it’s structured and there are guidelines set by Intel to make everything fair. This is one of the regional fairs that leads into the state fair, the Northwest Science Expo held at PSU on March 17. Category finalists will advance to the NWSE.

Best of Fair (two individual projects and one team project) winners will be entered into the Intel-ISEF May 7-13 in Indianapolis, Ind. and will be provided with flight and hotel accommodations.

About nine high schools are participating, including several from the Portland area. Students from Grant High School are doing over half of the 70 submitted exhibits, and other metro schools involved are Gresham, Wilson and Benson.The 15 fair categories include things like engineering, botany, physics, environmental science and microbiology, but the most common category at this fair, with 27 exhibits, is behavioral science.

A sample of project titles for the fair include “NO2 Concentration Levels in Gresham, Oregon,” “Glacier Change and Stream Discharge,” “The Effect of Seasonally Prescribed Burning on Tree Mortality,” and “How does advertising affect drug use among teens?”
Thatcher said the students will come Friday morning and set up their presentations in the gym and then the judges will move from project to project and interview the students.

The finalists for each category get interviewed again, the judges make their decision and the awards ceremony is that evening in the Vista Dining Room.
The judges, Thatcher said, are highly qualified with legitimate expertise in the field they are judging.
“It’s supposed to be a constructive process,” she said.
First-, second- third-place winners may be chosen according to category.
However, if none of the projects in a category are good, they are not required to choose a winner. Thatcher said they are really awarding excellence, so if there’s only one exhibit in a particular category, like there is in mathematics and computer science, it won’t necessarily get first place.

MHCC students, faculty, and staff are volunteering to help run the fair. Jim Arnold, the dean of science and technology, is the fair’s director and Heather Ohana is the assistant director.
John Kilkenny, a chemistry teacher at Grant High School, is helping two groups attend the fair and said he likes fairs like this because “I think they [the students] do science versus learn about science.”

He said he thinks students get a certain satisfaction from completing a project and comparing it to others.
“They see how they stack up,” he said, and that they get inspiration from seeing what others are doing.
Thatcher is excited about this event. “I think it’s fantastic for Mt. Hood. It’s a great experience for the students.” She said everyone learns from each other and it’s a lot of fun.

She said that she would think it was not only a great learning experience but also a good community building experience because students meet other science enthusiasts, and that the guidance of an expert in the field seems to have a positive affect on the students.

As for it being at MHCC, she said, “I think Mt. Hood has a lot to offer, some of the bright scientists and engineers, and we have a great faculty and staff. There’s just a lot of mutual benefits to having it here.”
The students’ exhibits will be open for public viewing in the gym Feb. 24 between 5 and 6 p.m.

Parts of the MHCC website were consulted for this story.