A crowd of lower school students looked up in awe as a bottle rocket launched to near ceiling height at the Lower School Science Fair. Using a pressure pump, Ella Mendez ’29 and Ella McKee ’29 hypothesized that the more air pressure they added into a soda bottle, the higher the bottle will rocket upwards. The students learned that there were other variables that impact the height of the bottle such as its angle at launch and the force of gravity. 

The fair, which took place on April 28, presented new innovative ideas from the fifth grade class. Students explored their curiosities and interests, came up with a hypothesis, and collected data to determine the outcomes of their experiments. They made presentation boards summarizing their findings to share with the lower school students at the fair.

Evan Ingrum ’29 and Otto Goergen ’29 hypothesized that students who play video games are more likely to have a faster reaction time in gameplay than students who do not play video games regularly. After testing 15 people from each subject group, the students learned that gaming students were only one-hundredth of a second faster than non-gamers.

“We tested all of the participants with three trials each and averaged the scores of the gamers and non-gamers. Although the reaction times were slightly faster for gamers, we did not feel that the difference was significant enough to really show that gamers have faster reaction times,” said Evan.  

“The primary objective of the Science Fair is to promote critical thinking and scientific problem solving through hands-on experimentation and observation,” said science teacher Shevon Morris. “The fifth-grade students have been exploring real-world problems to research, design, and create their science fair projects,” she added. 

Fifth grade student Terrielle Maltese built a catapult to test the distance of different objects. She revised the catapult a number of times before getting it to work successfully, trying out new designs and materials to achieve the desired result.

“Some projects might be hard to build but after all, the science project will always work in some way,” said Terrielle. “Even if the project totally fails, you still created something and figured out what went wrong with it and that’s still something. That’s still worth it.”