THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603310178
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: ANNE SAITA
LENGTH: Medium: 65 lines
Science projects definitely ranked high on my list of least-liked aspects of junior and senior high school.
The closest I ever came to actually putting together something clever was my junior year, when a chemistry partner and I decided to try and create ``super chickens.''
We planned months ahead to inject eggs with vitamin E and then see what hatched. We ended up the night before concocting an ethical-dilemma argument to explain why we lacked any results - or even eggs.
Needless to say, I never made it into a science fair like the one held Friday at Elizabeth City State University's Vaughan Center.
There, among dozens of the top science projects throughout northeastern North Carolina, I got a good glimpse of what I'd missed all those years.
The displays ranged from the perennial projects - soil analyses, product comparisons - to the more contemporary, like the best skateboarding surfaces. And they all seemed to demonstrate a lot of imagination and work.
One in particular I enjoyed was by 11-year-old Joshua Cogsdale, who didn't list the name of his school at his display. He wanted to know if the roll of the dice was predictable, believing that it was.
Joshua went even further to state to the world that the number 2 would appear most often within 150 rolls made by him and two friends.
Instead, the number 8 turned up most in what ended up being truly random rolls. Joshua then changed his hypothesis to say the least likely number would be 2.
Jonathan Brickhouse, a sixth-grader at Elizabeth City's Sheep-Harney Elementary School, turned to the past for his project, inventing an old-fashioned telegraph from wood, nails, wires, metal strips and a 6-volt lantern battery.
``I wanted to see the old ways of communication,'' he said of the project he worked three months to complete. Most classmates, he confided, spent far less time preparing experiments.
Fellow schoolmate Jenice Whitehurst, a fourth-grader, came up with her subject - the impact of caffeine on plants - after some cola-killings at home.
``I would spill soda in my mom's plants and they would die quickly, and I wanted to know why they would die so quick,'' she said.
Whitehurst's teacher, Ethel Meekins, said science fairs such as this one, representing elementary, middle and high school projects from a 15-county area, are really an inspiration.
``To elevate it to this point gives them the desire to continue,'' said Meekins, who learned to teach science at ECSU.
Belinda Lee, an associate professor at East Carolina University's School of Nursing, helped judge the elementary-school entries.
``I think the students we're getting are smarter,'' she said, adding that another judge said this year's entries were the best projects he'd seen in his 15 years of evaluating experiments.
``I think our future's very bright,'' Lee added of the promise shown in Friday's entrants.
Who knows, maybe some budding chemist in that crowd of children will someday show us a way to reach distant planets or help find a cure for cancer.
At the very least, these students helped show me that science could be fun. by CNB