Satellite High School senior Lillian Zobel grows tumors in her school’s science lab.
Zobel started the project earlier this school year to help understand whether using two-dimensional or three-dimensional cultures in research would be more effective.
She then built her own device that used magnets to lift the tumors up in the air, much like they would be in their natural state.
“When they’re floating they can kind of do what they want, which is what they do in the human body,” Zobel said.
Her project, titled “Effectiveness of 3D vs. 2D In-Vitro Well Treatments,” won the best of show award in senior biological sciences at the Brevard Public Schools Intracoastal Science Fair last week at Merritt Square Mall. She also received an invitation to the International Science and Engineering Fair, which will take place in May in Pittsburgh.
Satellite Senior Kelly Lynch won best of show in senior physical sciences, for her project titled “Home Ranges of Atlantic Great White Sharks: Using Spectral Analysis to Calculate Space/Time Distribution.” Lynch also received an invitation to the International Fair, which each year includes about 1,800 competitors from more than 80 countries.
Some 300 students entered the county competition, including 52 from Satellite High and 50 from neighboring Delaura Middle School. Nearly all took home awards.
Participating schools also included Cocoa Beach and Edgewood junior/senior high schools, Jefferson and McNair middle schools, Rockledge and Merritt Island high schools, as well as Divine Mercy Catholic School, Holy Trinity Episcopal Academy, Our Savior’s Catholic School, St. Mary’s Catholic School and Merritt Island Christian School.
Other area middle and high schools will be represented over the next two weeks at the mainland and south county science fairs.
All first-place winners will go on to the State Science and Engineering Fair in Lakeland in March.
Satellite junior Jules Volny, who won first place in the senior environmental engineering category for his project titled “An Investigation on Bilayer Organic Solar Cells,” said he often took notice of all the solar panels in local villages where he used to live in Germany, when his dad was in the military.
After Volny and his family moved to Florida, he wondered why solar power wasn’t utilized as much in a place that is nearly always sunny.
One reason, he discovered, was cost.
So Volny set out to find a cheaper way to produce solar panels.
Through four years of research, he has produced several types of solar panels made from various chemical compounds that are organic materials. “The benefits with organic solar cells are they are cheaper to create and of course use organic materials,” Volny said.
He hopes the clear panels could one day be used for windows or other building components. “You could power a whole skyscraper with them,” Volny said.
Winners from Satellite High also enjoy passing on their science knowledge to the next generation – they are serving as judges at the elementary school science fairs at Holland, Sea Park, Surfside and Ocean Breeze.
Delaura Middle School eighth-grader Cameron Wright, who took second place in junior physics and astronomy for his project titled “Speeding up Hearing: Aiding with Resonant Frequency,” used a 3D printer to create different shapes of tubes, or air columns, for sound to pass through, and then looked at how those shapes changed the sound frequencies.
“Which shape of air column is the best can maybe be used for a hearing aid in the future,” Wright said.
He’s been doing science projects since second grade, and hopes to continue this particular one through his high school career.
Judges at the Intracoastal Regional Science Fair represented the rich scope of science and technology in the region, including Rockwell, Northrop Grumman, Florida Institute of Technology, University of Florida, the U.S. military, Amazon Web Services and the Brevard Zoo.
Brevard County offers science research classes in middle and high school, where students develop and work on their science fair projects each year. Joe Scott, a science research teacher at Satellite, said this year was not unique in terms of winners – some of the top science fair winners in the county typically come from his classes. In fact, students from Satellite have advanced all the way to the International Science and Engineering Fair 16 out of the past 17 years, and 12 of those have placed fourth or higher.
“It’s a life-changing experience for those kids,” Scott said.
More importantly, he said, students in his classes leave high school already experienced in complex scientific research.
“When they go into college, they go in ahead of their peers,” Scott said.
Satellite senior Lindsey Geiger, who won first place in senior cellular/molecular biology and biochemistry for her project on “A Comparative Analysis of Treatments for Metastatic Breast Cancer: Year 3,” said the lab was key to her successful three-year science project.
“All this research, we did at our school lab, not in a college,” Geiger said.
She plans to attend the University of South Florida in the fall and would like to eventually become a clinical researcher at the Mayo Clinic. “I can’t imagine what my high school career would have been like if I hadn’t been in science research,” Geiger said.
