ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 3, 1996 TAG: 9612030078
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
SALEM HIGH SCHOOLER James Rankin came away a winner in national math and science competition by teaming up with a student from Massachusetts over the Internet.
James Rankin won a $6,000 college scholarship for creating a home page on the World Wide Web about something you've probably never heard of: fractals.
Yes, fractals are an esoteric subject that you probably won't hear discussed at the water fountain or over morning coffee.
No, they're not a topic for research papers by archeologists or anthropologists.
Fractals are geometric-like images that are generated on a computer screen by algebraic formulas that are repeated many times.
Rankin, a senior at Salem High School, knows a lot about fractals.
Look up his home page on the Internet and you'll be impressed. It's titled: ``Chaos and Fractals.''
The address is: http://tgd.advanced.org/3703
You'll also find other World Wide Web pages showing how to make fractals and the equations to generate them.
``They are more of an interesting theory now, but I think they will have practical applications,'' Rankin said.
Fractals will probably lead to smaller and faster computers because ``they can help show us how to compress data,'' he said. ``If you can compress data, you can decrease the size of the hard drive and you can speed up computers.''
Rankin teamed with Rand Kmiec, a junior at Concord-Carlisle High School in Concord, Mass., to win fourth place in the science and mathematics category in the national ThinkQuest contest for middle and high school students with their project on fractals.
Rankin, 17, was the only winner from Western Virginia in the Internet competition that attracted more than 3,000 students from 49 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
Several students from the region, including a team from the Roanoke Valley Governor's School for Science and Technology, entered the contest, but the only other winners in the state came from the Northern Virginia and Tidewater areas.
Rankin never saw Kmiec, his teammate who also won $6,000, until the two students met in Washington last week for the first awards ceremony for the ThinkQuest contest.
They had communicated by e-mail as they planned and prepared their Web pages.
One of the contest goals was to foster collaboration among students from dissimilar schools across the country. Rankin teamed with Kmiec after they made contact on the Web bulletin board for the ThinkQuest competition.
In the contest, students worked together to create educational tools that will be useful to students and teachers everywhere.
Rankin, who has a grade-point average of 4.3 in the International Baccalaureate program at Salem High, will attend Virginia Tech. He has already been accepted and plans to study either computer engineering or computer science.
He said he spent three months planning his entry and another month preparing it - programming in the formulas and creating different images. The Web pages include a description of the fractals and how to create them.
``We spent a lot of time on programming and we used different computer language,'' he said.
Rankin, who has a pilot's license and does some flying when he's not engrossed in computers and homework, said he got interested in fractals in a math class several years ago.
Dreama Menefee, mathematics coordinator for Salem schools, was Rankin's coach for the ThinkQuest contest - a requirement for all teams. She received $1,000 and Salem's math department received $1,000 because he was the fourth-place winner.
Menefee said very little research has been done in fractals because it is such a new field.
``It's very current and it's mainly of interest to people in math and science,'' Menefee said. ``It was a different kind of project and the audience for it is much smaller than social sciences, arts and literature and other subjects.''
The winning entry in science and mathematics - by a team from Rocky Run Middle School in Chantilly in Northern Virginia - also dealt with fractals.
A team from Potomac, Md., was selected best in contest for creating ``Economics and Investment,'' a stock market simulation on the World Wide Web that people can use to learn how the stock market works. More than $1million in scholarships and cash prizes were awarded in the contest sponsored by Advanced Network & Services, Inc., a nonprofit corporation to advance education by the use of computers.
Rankin said he's been interested in computers for about three years, since he took a computer course at Salem High and bought a computer.
``I've taught myself almost everything I've learned since I took the basic course,'' he said. ``I like programing and making Web pages.''
LENGTH: Medium: 94 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: NHAT MEYER\Staff. James Rankin, a senior at Salem Highby CNBSchool, was awarded a $6,000 scholarship for his work on the
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