Photos by Pat Christman
Peter Goblirsch, from Sleepy Eye St. Mary's school, has his project judged by Brian Allen during Saturday's Regional Science and Engineering Fair at Minnesota State University.
Nick Schmall of Chanhassen explains his project on concrete strength to a judge.
Michael Galwe from New Ulm Catholic Schools explains his project on tsunami to judges.
You can always count on the science fair to answer some of life's most pressing questions.
What brand of garbage bags should you buy? Do kids perform better academically listening to SpongeBob or the Macarena? How dangerous is it to drive and send a text message?
Or this question, a riddle wrapped in a puzzle posted on a science fair board: What kind of mascara is more apt to catch fire?
Amelia Malmberg of Walnut Grove Middle School was a believer in mascara until embarking on her first science fair study of the makeup for last year's science fair. This year, she's honed the research.
She tested different kinds of mascara, whether flammability changes over time, and whether waterproof mascara affects flammability.
Today, she doesn't use mascara because she doesn't want her face to catch fire. But if she did use it, it would be the home brew recipe she found on the Internet.
"As far as I know," she said, "it's very safe."
Malmberg's project was one of 280 projects packed into the Centennial Student Union Ballroom at Minnesota State University.
Every year the place is overrun with overachieving students whose projects at their individual schools’ science fairs were good enough to get them to regionals.
Down the row from Amelia sat New Ulm pals Gabriella Delacruz and Tamara Hellendrung, both seventh graders at New Ulm Cathedral.
Delacruz denied being addicted to popcorn, but she had no other explanation for taking on a project that aimed to find the most efficiently popped popcorn. She even had wacky popcorn facts, like the one about the popcorn that was found in a cave so well preserved that, five millennia later, it still popped!
Generic popcorn popped best. It beat out Orville Redenbacher and Jolly Time. Oh, and did you know that if you freeze the kernels and then put them in popping oil, the resulting puffs of corn will be larger than normal? It's true. Gabriella says so.
Hellendrung’s project took aim at a key player in one of her weekly chores: garbage — garbage sacks, to be more precise. Which sacks, she hypothesized, hold up the best? In the end, through a battery of garbage bag battering tests, the big-name bag, the Glad bag, came out the big winner.
And she says her family will probably stick with Glad bags, but only after they use up the several hundred bags needed to conduct the experiment.
Nick Schmall, a student at St. Hubert's Catholic School in Chanhassen, was intrigued by the collapse last year of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis.
He'd heard some of the concrete had holes in it, so he wanted to find out whether holes contribute to a bridge's strength. He found out that, up to a certain point, holes are good and can make a slab of concrete stronger. But too many holes are bad, and can lead to failure.
St. James seventh graders Jessica Carvatt and Aryn Eckstrom went Xbox on this year's science fair. Their project's goal was to find out which age group's driving is most affected by using a mobile phone for talking or sending text messages.
They asked teens, middle agers and senior citizens to belly up to the Xbox console and play Grand Theft Auto, a driving game. While driving, they had the participants use a cell phone to talk, look up numbers on a mobile phone address book, and send text messages.
The results, which showed everyone's driving is impaired by such distractions, scared Carvatt a little.
"It makes me feel nervous to drive with my brother," she said, "because he's a really crazy driver."
Added Eckstrom, "You shouldn't be doing anything when you're driving. It's not just about your safety. It's others' safety, too."
And finally, seventh grader Katie Morris of New Prague did a project that has sort of a good news-bad news angle to it when it comes to how kids do their homework.
She wanted to know whether kids performed better on a test while a television was on, or whether listening to music was better (and if so, what kind of music). Using actual classrooms full of New Prague Middle School students, she compared results of math tests taken by students exposed to various media.
The good news: It's OK to listen to "The Macarena" while taking a math test. The bad news: Watching SpongeBob Squarepants ain't so good. The math test scores were higher while the kids listened to dance music.
Classical music, meanwhile, fared worse than dance music.
"I think it's because kids normally listen to that kind of music," Morris said.
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