Students show off their experiments at regional science fair

Mariana Sanchez says her older brother would play the music in his room so loud, the noise would resound throughout the house, not letting her concentrate on her homework. And they would often fight over it.

So, instead of choice words and futile arguments, the seventh-grader at Vela Middle School resorted to the scientific method to show how music affects students. She designed a project in which students listened to different genres of music while working on a math test and found classical tunes or no beats at all allowed them to score higher.

"It was fun to see the reactions some people had (while listening to the music). Some people got frustrated, others were scratching their heads," Sanchez, 13, said standing next to the board displaying her results at the Rio Grande Valley regional science fair.

About 500 students competed in the fair, which includes more than 20 schools from a dozen districts in the Valley, from Laredo to Corpus Christi and down to Brownsville. This year, the fair also celebrates its 50

"There is a shortage of scientists and engineers in the community," said Adrienne Zermeno, a faculty associate at UTB-TSC who helped organize the event and register students. "What I like the most about the fair is that it gets students excited in science."

About 300 middle school students competed in the fair, and more than 200 high school students participated. Science projects were displayed at different building of the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College.

And inspiration for experiments came from everywhere. Noah Gonzalez’s idea, for instance, came to him while flipping through the pages of a magazine and reading an article on birds caught in oil spills. The 13-year-old student designed a project to find which substance could best remove oil from feathers. Dawn dish detergent was the most effective, he said.

"I really enjoyed seeing the results of my project," said Gonzalez, a seventh-grader at Vela Middle School.

Lia Schexnayder, also a seventh-grader at Vela Middle School, won fourth place in Plant Sciences for her project, "Black Rainbow." She used chromatography to test the best solvent used to separate the spectrum of colors from black ink.

"My mom is an art teacher, and I always wondered, ‘Can you separate the colors from black ink?’" she said.

Though her project entailed ink, it fell under the plant sciences division as chromatography is also used in the study of plants.

Out of the 19 different categories, first, second and third winners advance to the state championship. The regional science fair’s grand champion, first runner up and top team automatically advance to the International Fair in San Jose later this year.

Grand champion for the middle school division, Sharon Everitt, also used chromatography. She tested whether the pigment of the chili peppers was related to their spiciness and found that the milder the color, the hotter the pepper. This was the first year the sixth-grade student at Mary Hoge Middle School in Weslaco made it past the district science fair.

"It involved a lot of research, and I learned a lot from it," Everitt said.