Thursday – Newsletter

Amoolya Narayanan

What a day! Today, we woke up around 8 a.m. to eat breakfast and head straight to the convention center for a day of public viewing of our projects. Thousands of people came to view our projects. It was nice to see kids of various ages being interested in our projects. This public viewing lasted from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. During this the four hour period, finalists found ways to keep themselves entertained, whether it was by starting small talk with other finalists, playing games, or just talking to the kids who came to the viewing from nearby schools. In the morning, we all received a plethora of people curious about our project and asking questions. During the final hour of this public viewing time, Ryan and I headed over near Ryota’s project and met an international Chinese student and played a nice game of cards with him.  Overall, we had an amazing time during the public viewing period.

After public viewing, we were planning to go back to the hotel, change into comfortable clothing and head to our normal park to play ultimate frisbee and other park games. Unfortunately, our usual park was closed due to a graduation being held there. This didn’t stop us from having fun. We asked a police officer where we could find another park, and he directed us towards a library with a park outside. However, after we got there, we found we could not play ultimate frisbee because a majority of the park was being used to film a Geico commercial! We all witnessed the Geico Caveman being filmed! This was better than any frisbee game to us. After this, around 4 p.m. we headed back to the hotel to change back into our formal clothes to go to dinner and the special awards ceremony.

As much as we thought the special awards ceremony would be such a drag, with too many special award categories, it was actually extremely fun! We found a way to entertain ourselves and cheered frantically as Ryan and Swathi each got a special award! After all the cheering and congratulating at the special awards ceremony, we enjoyed our walk back to the hotel with Ryota’s singing and Shuhbro and David’s beat boxing. The three of them made their own INTEL ISEF song to the tune of the famous song, “Airplanes.”

I would say overall today was a wonderful, action filled day and we all are looking forward to tomorrow’s grand award ceremony!

 

Special Awards Received

ISEF Category: Animal Sciences (AS022)
– Biological Control of Ticks to Prevent Lyme Disease Using Entomopathogenic Nematodes
Ryan Daniel Kerr, 15, Sophomore, Danbury High School, Danbury, Connecticut

American Veterinary Medical Association
– First Award of $1,000 and a plaque

The AMVA is committed to the improvement of animal and human health and the advancement of the veterinary medical profession.

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ISEF Category: Medicine and Health (ME038)
– Development and Characterization of a Novel Listeria-Caspase-3 DNA Vaccine to Eradicate Metastatis Breast Cancer
Swathi Krishnan, 17, Senior, Rye Country Day School – Upper School, Rye, New York

Fondazione Bruno Kessler
– Award to travel Trento, Italy to participate in summer school WebValley

The Fondazione Bruno Kessler is a leading research center located in Trento, Italy. WebValley, started in 2001, is the FBK Summer School program for interdisciplinary scientific research. Each year a team of enthusiastic and motivated high school students and FBK researchers accepts a project challenge proposed by an external scientist. The theme of the 2011 challenge is a Web-Kinect-GIS interface to climate change scenarios. Novel ways to interact with maps and complex environmental data will be explored, developing a prototype exhibit for the new Trento Science Museum.

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ISEF Category: Energy and Transportation (ET032)
– Optimization of a Microbial Fuel Cell to Drive a Bioelectrochemically Assisted Wastewater Treatment Reactor
Ryota Ishizuka, 17, Junior, Greenwich High School, Greenwich, Connecticut

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