Popular science: Area students show off their projects

A total of 441 students from 27 schools across the region exhibited outcomes of a variety of experiments Tuesday as part of the 58th annual Southeast Missouri Regional Science Fair.

The event at the Show Me Center featured 278 Junior Division and 41 Senior Division projects.

Awards were presented for first, second and third place and Best of Show, plus there are special awards -- some of which included cash. The top two finishers -- Austin Van De Ven of Notre Dame Regional High School and Jon Rodgers of Dexter High School -- advance to the International Science Fair on May 11 through 16 in Los Angeles, and an eighth-grader -- Makayla Job of Scott City Middle School -- will attend as an observer.

Hannah Landewe, an eighth-grader at St. Vincent de Paul grade school in Cape Girardeau, conducted a detergent experiment that persuaded her family to change brands.

Using white strips of material with black circles drawn on them, Landewe placed stains such as chocolate and juice on the strips. She tried washing them in a coffee can with Tide, All, Woolite, Purex and Gain, shook them up and awaited the results. She also tried water, but that didn't work well.

Landewe found Gain worked best, prompting her family to switch from All.

The idea for the experiment came up when she and her dad were at the grocery store. They wondered why there were so many detergents.

Among the many science ventures tackled, students also tried to determine which gum was most effective against mouth microbes, perception vs. reality, which wood burns hotter and whether weather affects a person's mood.

Jenna Winkler, Kati Schnurbusch and Abby Buchheit, all eighth-graders at St. Vincent's in Perryville, Mo., worked on the gum project to determine which type of Wrigley's got rid of the most mouth bacteria.

The three tested five flavors. "We thought that Big Red would be the best, but it's actually the worst," Buchheit said.

David Wyman, a

Missouri Department of Transportation engineer in his second year as a judge, said what interests children interests him. "I like to look at all the projects, and then of course, you find some that would have some ... real-world benefits. Those are always very interesting to me," Wyman said.

"I like the ones that the children really take an interest in. You can tell some of them are just doing it as a project for school and some of them are really interested in what the result is going to be. It's always good when the science fair stimulates a real good question and gives ... you some real good answers for later on," Wyman said.

Chris McGowan, dean of Southeast's College of Science, Technology and Agriculture and a professor in the Department of Chemistry, said the fair attracted about the same number of projects this year as last, but with about 40 fewer students. Eighty people participated as judges.

A community committee with representatives from the college, local schools and industry organize the fair each year. McGowan said the fair dates are planned three years in advance, so the event already is scheduled for 2017.

"The goal here is to get kids excited about science," McGowan said.

rcampbell@semissourian.com

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