Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows students were big winners at the Fraser Valley Regional Science Fair held on Thursday, April 7.
Awards were handed out April 9.
Zining Yu and Akira Yoshiyama of Meadowridge School were grand prize winners taking top spot – NSERC Young Innovator Award and the CWSF – for their project on the generative design of airfoils. They also won the BC Game Developers Innovation Award for students in Grades 11-12, the IQ Engineering Award for students in Grades 9-12, the Sanofi Biogenius Canada Award for students in Grades 7-12, UFV Mathematics Award, UFV Physics Award for students in Grades 8-12, and the UFV Statistics Award.
The pair won $450 in special prizes for their project.
Maggie Escaravage of Pitt Meadows Elementary won for Best Project from kindergarten to Grade 6, called The Power of Light.
She came up with the idea because she wanted to do a project on a topic that would help with climate change.
“We are learning about it in school,” said the 10- year-old. “And we are watching a bunch of Greta Thunberg videos,” she added referring to the teen Swedish environmental activist.
Her project was about solar energy and how she could charge a cellphone or tablet with free energy from the sun, explained her father Jake Escaravage.
They purchased the solar panels and, together with the help of her father, soldered them together.
Then Maggie did the research and took notes about how long it took each item to charge.
“It was on a very small scale, because we didn’t want to spend $1,000 on solar panels,” her father laughed.
Maggie said the most difficult thing about her project was getting it to work, because, as she found out, it did not work well on cloudy days. And, said Maggie, it was hard to write about something everyday, when some days there was nothing to write about.
However she did enjoy building it and is aspiring to be an engineer or a pilot when she grows up.
Maggie took home $25 from the science fair and a medal for her efforts. And she was ecstatic, added her father.
“She was pretty proud of herself,” he said.
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