As their years at St. Joseph come to a close, 13 eighth graders will represent St. Joseph School in the Region II Science Fair at the University of St. Francis in Joliet on Friday, March 11, 2011 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Hosting their 24th Regional Science Fair, St. Francis will welcome over 600 junior high and high school students from 49 elementary schools, seven high schools and other regional private schools. Nearly 300 teachers and volunteer judges will administer the event.

St. Joseph School in Downers Grove will send off their top eight projects involving 13 eighth grade students to compete in this competition. “This science fair project is a culmination of the nine year science program at St. Joseph,” said long-time St. Joseph science teacher, Erin VanIderstine. Students were able to choose their own project, working alone or with a partner.

Students Shannon Kennedy and Daina Polikaitis knew that they would be partners in this project. “Actually, when we were in sixth grade we were friends, and we watched our brothers create their projects. We decided then that we would work together when it was our turn.” Kennedy added, “We wanted a subject that we would actually learn things from.” She and Polikaitis chose a physics project, “The Water Absorbency of Fabric”, but that wasn’t their initial idea. “Originally we wanted to study the water resistance of fabrics to find what we should wear the in the rain.” But a little mix up in testing trials led them to study absorbency instead. To test their theory, the two built an incline plane out of wood and laminate. “We didn’t want the wood to absorb the water,” added Polikaitis. Their findings determined that cotton was the most water absorbent with wool being the least absorbent.

St. Joseph Science teacher, Michelle DeBruler works closely with VanIderstine on this science lesson. “The exciting part of this project is seeing our students pursue their own personal interests in the sciences. This adds so much more to the projects. They are much more passionate about their personal projects.”

Evan Culligan created his chemistry project, "Materials to Heat Energy" to discover the amount of heat energy released from three different materials when they are burned. Culligan wants to be a veterinarian someday.

“My sister majoring in biology and my brother is an engineer major so my family is very scientific,” he said. “I was very interested in heat energy, thinking along the lines of scientific measurements and how molecules speed up.” Working closely with his father because of the use of fire in his project, Culligan chose notebook paper, dried leaves and cardboard measured in grams to discover the amount of heat energy released from these different materials when burned. His conclusion was that cardboard released the greatest amount of heat energy, and he believes it was its layers which helped fuel the fire. He concluded that durability helps a material release a large amount of heat energy.

Culligan is new to St. Joseph, having recently moved from Voldosta, Georgia. “I’ve never had a science project like this with such detail. I’ve done classroom level things but not like this.”

The Botany project, “The Effect of Radiation on Radish Seed Germination” was chosen by longtime neighbors, Megan Kitz and Angelica Naber. These two wanted nothing elaborate in their project, yet wanted it interesting. Using 20 radish seeds and a microwave as their form of radiation, the two determined that more and more radiation had harmful effects on the growth of radish seeds and the extended amount of radiation resulted in slower growth. “We doubled our trials to make sure we had accurate results,” said Kitz. The two pointed to the research paper as the most difficult, but both found the experiment and backboard fun.

Sean Harnik chose the field of Engineering with his project, “London Bridge is Falling Down.” He found himself looking at a photograph of a bridge, which sparked his interest. He wanted to ascertain the amount of mass that different types of trusses could sustain before the bridge exceeds the maximum weight allowed before breaking. Harnick found it to be a good learning process. Creating several styles of bridges, he found the bridge with the most members was able to support the most weight. Harnik also used a formula of bending a simple beam bridge to mathematically calculate the approximate amount of weight that a bridge should hold. “I couldn’t break my most complex bridge, after using more than 30 kilograms of weights.” Harnik hopes to pursue architectural design in his future.

Ryan Donofrio chose a Physics project, “How Low Does the Dough Go?”. “I saw it in a book and thought it would be interesting.” Using his mom’s dough recipe, Donofrio combined the weight of a golf ball, foosball and ping-pong ball to determine the effects of mass and velocity on momentum. His hypothesis was correct. The heaviest ball had the biggest impact on the dough and overall created the biggest craters.

After attending a state science fair with her sister, Rachel Watson found herself interested in projects involving sound. She and partner, Clare Morrison chose the Physics project, “Can You Hear Me Now?” The two looked online for sound projects and went to work building boxes made from various materials to determine which product most blocked sound. Choosing materials from their local hardware store, the two used an alarm clock and a sound meter to help with their findings. “At first we did it wrong; we were moving the sound meter around too much and found our numbers were off,” said Morrison, adding “so we started over and found more accurate results.” Predicting plywood would block the most sound, the two actually found ceramic tile to block the most sound with acoustical tile finishing a close second.

The Louisiana oil spill inspired Kayla Lindemann and Hannah McGrath with their Material/Environmental Science project, “Soakin' Up Oil”. After studying cotton, silk, wool and leather, their findings proved that wool absorbs the most oil with leather being a close second. “We had a problem with our project, because we originally used oil and water as mix at first, but we called on Environmental Scientist, Steve Padovani, who suggested using only oil in our project,” they said. They also realized the difficulty in cleaning up oil as they struggled to clean their graduated cylinders and containers following the multiple trials.

Maggie Johnson and Monica Lim studied Biochemistry with their project, “Got Pain?”

“We wanted a helpful, practical purpose for our project,” said Lim, adding “people want to get pain relief quickly.” The purpose was to determine the dissolution speed of various brands of painkillers. Realizing that dissolving pills in simple water could take too much time, they called the Downers Grove North Science Department and got some feedback from teacher, Miss Baal. With her help, they used a glass beaker, a hot plate and a magnetic stirrer to speed up the pill’s breakdown process. Their experiment concluded that aspirin tablets dissolved the fastest of all the painkillers used, while the Advil Gelcaps took the longest to dissolve. Both were surprised the melt-away tablet did not dissolve the fastest. The two learned much more than just the dissolution speed with this project. Their research paper included the history, ingredients, and types of painkillers and how the pills are digested and processed through the body into the blood stream.

Regional results will determine who moves onto the State Science Exhibition to be held at the University of Illinois at Champaign in May, 2011.