On Thursday, March 8th, Willie Fitzpatrick, Keith Jadus, and Frank Parris judged the North Alabama Regional Science & Engineering Fair (NARSEF) for IEEE special awards. The following evening Frank presented certificates and a mail-in form for a $100 savings bond to our four junior division and four senior division winners. Our participants had a lot of fun judging, and saw a lot of new projects, as well as some follow ons from last year. Following are our winners:Junior Division
EN115 - Joel Tinker, Covenant Christian Academy - "Splish Splash Again! A Study of Fuel Sloshing in Rockets and Automobiles" - a follow on from last year, and one of our former award recipients.
PS149 - Ilyaas Miran - "Atmospheric Haze" - student fabricated an atmospheric haze meter from components purchased at Radio Shack, and discovered it's hazier in Madison than Huntsville or Athens.
PS166 - Trey Gould, Liberty Middle School - "Have I Got Your Attenuation?" - an experiment to test degree of attenuation, or radio interference, between a transmitter and radio controlled car when aluminum foil is used to block the signal.
PS174 - Daniel Johnston, Liberty Middle School - "Solar Cell: Is The Power It Generates Affected by the Angle of the Sun?" - student fabricated a home-made solar cell, then used an ammeter to test current at different sun angles.
Senior Division
EN264 - Patrick Eads, Covenant Christian Academy - "Catch the Rays" - an experiment using different types of mirrors to focus sunlight on a photo cell, to determine if output would be increased. As you may expect, it was by ~30 times, and the photo cell had to be mounted on a heat sink to keep it from melting.
EN279 - Scott Schiavone, Covenant Christian Academy - "Computer Controlled Pneumatic Launch System with GPS Targeting" - my personal favorite, the student developed a compressed air cannon used to launch pvc darts at distant (up to 1/3 mile) targets, with GPS used to assist with targeting information. Before performing actual experiment runs (at a Redstone Arsenal test range, no less), he wrote a computer simulation to predict results and provide system parameters.
MC285 - Joel Eichelkraut, Catholic High School - "Numerical Analysis of Modern Songs Using Musical Graph Theory" - a rather complex system of decomposing music into numerical constructs in order to compare similarity between songs and genres of songs. The conclusion was that all music uses a certain set of "pleasing" notes, but that different types of music are indeed quite different as to what groups of notes they use (e.g., rock is different than classical).
MC286 - Dustin Millwood, Master's Hand Christian School - "Unique Eye-dentity" - an analytical examination of whether an eye's iris is unique and therefore may be used for identification purposes. The student had well documented, thorough research to support his conclusion that, yes, the iris can be used for biometric identification.
Pictured at Left: IEEE Senior Division Award Winners. Left to right, Frank Parris, Dustin Millwood, Joel Eichelkraut, Patrick Eads, Scott Schiavone, and Dr. Jorge Auñón, Dean, UAH College of Engineering.
