Students Put Lessons to Test for Science Fair

For Breanne Henkelman, winning the overall, first-place prize at Mesa Union School’s science fair was just a bonus. Learning was the real reward.

Breanne, 13, who has been competing in science fairs since she was in kindergarten, spent the past few months studying the links between global warming and deforestation. She said it was her most ambitious project yet.

Breanne studied the air temperature and moisture variations among rain forests, pastoral areas and barren land using terrariums that mirrored the botanical mosaic of each region.

“I had a lot of fun,” the eighth-grade scientist said. “I was concerned with global warming and learned a lot about it during my project.”

Breanne was among 135 students from fifth through eighth grades who competed in the annual fair.

Debby Dunn, Mesa Union’s science teacher and organizer of the event, said that even if the students don’t want to pursue science, they learn a lot from the event.

“It’s a more authentic way of seeing if the kids understand what you’re teaching them,” she said. “Even if they don’t really like science, they’ll never forget what they learned.”

Housed in the school’s cafeteria, the two-day science fair featured projects ranging from the stoically scientific to the whimsically lighthearted.

Sixth-grade students Gilberto Hernandez and Elias Perez teamed up to measure the transpiration rates of different plants under equal amounts of light while another sixth-grader, Jothi Adaikkalam, investigated the age at which people stop believing in Santa Claus. It ranges from 12 to 14 years.

Another competitor, 12-year-old Kristen Hirashima, compared pesticides to predatory bugs and found some surprising results.

“While pesticides are best in the short term, bugs are the best because they eat a lot of different pests at the same time,” she explained. “Besides that, using bugs is cheaper and helps keep the balance of nature.”

Even the panel of judges, some scientists themselves, came away impressed with the quality of the projects.

“What I liked about this year was that there were more practical, problem-solving projects,” said Peter Tolley, one of the judges and a lab manager at Twyford Plant Labs in Santa Paula.

Paul Dwork, another judge and owner of Merlin’s Science and Magic in Camarillo, was also taken with the maturity of projects and the perseverance the students showed in completing them.

“The kids really did some interesting things this year,” he said. “They all had a different focus and really looked into some tough questions.”

For some of the students, Mesa Union’s science fair won’t be the last. Students who placed in the event, a total of 49, will compete in the county science fair to be held in April at the Ventura County Fairgrounds.