One of the hardest — and perhaps most unusual — things Anna Hair had to do as she assembled her project for the 65th annual St. Mary’s County Science and Engineering Fair was to request a photo.
Of a thumb. A bloody thumb.
Hair, who is a junior at Leonardtown High School, was putting together her Scissor-Jack in the Box project, which she believes is an improvement over the spike strips employed by law enforcement agencies. She knew that a friend’s father was in local law enforcement and his thumb had been scratched up while deploying the spike strips.
“I was like, ‘Hey, this is a weird request but please send me a picture of it,’” she said of the photo, which she did in fact receive.
The annual county science fair was held Jan. 17 and drew 135 exhibits and 142 students in the junior (middle school) and senior (high school) divisions to the SMART building in California.
“I have been constantly impressed with the amount of almost collegiate-level exhibits these students are doing sometimes,” St. Mary’s County Science and Engineering Fair Board President Mark Ragland said. “These students are so passionate about the projects they’re doing that they’ll go into college-level research.”
Ragland, a former grand prize winner himself, added that one judge who works in the aerospace engineering field saw an exhibit by an eighth-grader and figured he’d “see what this kid knows, drilled him [with questions] and said, ‘He knew everything.’ This is college level stuff.”
Some local winners will go on to compete in the Prince George’s County Regional competition, which will be held March 14-15.
“I’m just starting this journey through the brilliance of the students attending St. Mary’s County Public Schools,” St. Mary’s County Superintendent Scott Smith said. “Not only does it show the culmination of the great deal of very dedicated and advanced learning, but also it’s an inspiring amount of creativity. These projects really show that they are harnessing their learning and the current technology is being applied them in really a fantastic way from safety bracelets to proximity alerts to underwater robotics.”
Hair’s idea would be a spike strip that would essentially be ejected from a box about 2-by-4-feet much like a jack-in-the-box toy.
Hair said the law enforcement device could stretch across one lane of traffic and be carried around or even bolted into the ground, if needed.
She said she came up with the idea “because [regular spike strips] don’t come out smoothly when used repetitively, so I wanted to do something that would smoothly deploy.”
Hair, whose project took second-place in the Engineering Technology: Statics and Dynamics for the senior division, said she took a remote-controlled car “and ripped it apart and used the motor to reel [the spike strip] back in.”
She added her real prototype would definitely be a stronger [engine], “but this was the cheapest I could find.”
Many projects were based on the concerns of today such as Khadija Talha’s “Flying Sustainable: The Cleaner Way to Fly,” Jane Venendaal’s “Recycled or Trashed,” Diana Wyman’s “Solar Clear Water” and Ryan Cory’s “How Does Acid Rain Affect Plant Growth?”
Ragland said five projects were based on artificial intelligence.
“They’re coming from their own personal experiences that are drawing them toward intellectual exploration and experiment,” Smith said. “A majority of these projects, when you talk to the students they’ll walk back to their inspiration. It might be somebody in their family, it might be Spiderman, it might be something they’ve seen in a movie. … We have definitely moved on from the [old-style projects like] volcanoes and planetary systems and things like that. These are not experiments of yore. It’s a good sign.”
