Finding Wonder in Daily Life : Education: Van Nuys Junior High students explore a variety of projects, with winners advancing to the county science fair next week.

The gee-whiz factor would seem to be in short supply these days at junior high science fairs. After all, students of that age grew up at a time when even household appliances had on-board computers and were likely digital.

But most of the 148 students who submitted projects to the Van Nuys Junior High School science fair last month seemed to have found wonder in everyday items and creatures.

What seeds do different species of birds prefer? How safe is the water at school? How beneficial are earthworms to a garden? Which disposable diaper absorbs best? Do parents have an effect on grades? What detergent works best? How do plants react to rap music?

Youth wants to know.

“You have to remember that these students have only been studying science for two years at most,” said Ross Arnold, a teacher who oversees the annual science fair.

“Some of the projects might not have been highly technical, but as much as anything, this is about the scientific process, learning how science research is done.”

Arnold and other teachers at the school chose 20 finalists to be examined by a panel of 14 outside judges, ranging from engineers at Edwards Air Force Base and Rockwell’s Rocketdyne Division to students at the nearby Van Nuys High Math/Science Magnet School.

The winners chosen by the judges will represent the junior high at the county science fair Monday through Wednesday at the Los Angeles Sports Arena.

The judges met in the school library, where the projects were on display. “Don’t be afraid to ask them questions,” Arnold told them. “They should be prepared to provide answers. But be gentle.”

The last direction was hardly needed. Although a bit nervous, most of the students seemed anxious to show off their projects.

“Hi, my name is Jessica and I did my project on ‘Can a mouse adapt to change?’ ” a chipper, bespectacled Jessica Dryden-Cook, 12, said to the judges as she presented the colorful maze she had made out of cardboard strips and tubing. She explained how she had gotten mice used to taking one path through the maze toward food.

Then she blocked off that route to see if they would find an alternative. The mice did not adapt well.

When she finished her talk and left the room, the judges noted that it was not the most original of projects.

“I think there is never a science fair without an animal maze,” said Steven Miller, who is in charge of maintaining the mission control rooms used for flight testing at Edwards.

But then the judges started looking through the detailed project journal that Jessica had kept. It had dozens of hand-drawn graphs, copious notes and a clear explanation of how she had established a control group for comparison.

“I’ve seen sloppier controls kept in college labs,” a clearly impressed Miller said.

Perhaps the most thorough and charming of journals was kept by eighth-grader Luis Torres. His handwritten entries began Dec. 21 with a one-sentence notation:

“I was thinking about what to do for my science project.”

The next entry, on Dec. 22, reads:

“I am still thinking about what do for my science project.”

Subsequent entries tell of Christmas and New Year’s celebrations with his family, outings with friends, a day at Magic Mountain and a visit to his aunt’s house, all while thinking about possible science projects. Luis finally decided to test several laundry detergents to see which one would do the best job on dirty socks.

It, too, was not an original idea. There were at least four other laundry detergent comparison projects at the school and one student, eighth-grader Steve Turnipseed, compared the absorbency of several brands of disposable diapers (he used water for the tests).

For originality, the judges turned to Sandy Rosco, 13, who did an experiment to see if earthworms had any effect on the pH level of soil. “I got the idea when I saw worms on the ground after a rain,” she told the judges.

To conduct the experiment, Sandy doused soil with lemon juice to make it acidic and then added worms.

“Weren’t you a bit squeamish of worms?” one of the judges asked.

“No, not me!” Sandy said, defiantly. “They are our friends.”

Sandy found that the friendly worms indeed brought the soil down to a more neutral pH level.

The project that most caught the attention of the judges was Josh MacAdam’s “Bearing-Free Electrostatic Generator.”

“I thought it would be good to see if you could generate electricity without all the problems you get from friction in turbines,” the soft-spoken Josh, 12, explained to the judges.

“Well, that is a big problem, I know,” said judge Ralph Coates, who worked on design of the space shuttle at Rocketdyne.

Josh had used oatmeal boxes, a bucket, plastic hoses, nails, plastic tumblers, aluminum foil and other paraphernalia to construct his gizmo. It allowed water to flow through foil-lined cups connected to a miniature light bulb.

Josh admitted that the device would generate enough electricity to light the bulb only under optimum conditions. On the judging day, the humidity was probably too high for it to work, he said, and he could not get the bulb lit.

But Coates was impressed.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Coates told Josh. “I want someone else to see this.” And Coates went to fetch Philip Raneri, a judge who is a structural engineer at Edwards.

Raneri and Josh had a lively, technical conversation about generating electricity, with the young student keeping up his end of the talk about electrons, neutrons and the like. The judges were even more amazed when they found out that Josh had transferred recently to Van Nuys Junior High and had put together the project in only three weeks.

After Josh left the room, judge Jay Morre, an architect who is an assistant project manager with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, pulled out the score sheet the judges used to rate the projects. There were 20 different categories listed, each to be scored from a low of 1 to a high of 5.

“Tell me when to stop putting down 5s,” Moore told the others as he began filling in the sheet.

Josh was one of the winners who will go to the county event.

Other winners included Sandy (soil and earthworms), Jessica (the mouse maze), along with Augustine Bradley, who looked into the methods used to determine the composition of distant stars; Omid Yasharel, who tested the pH level of the school’s water; Mike Aaron, who broke down the color composition in marking pens, and Hedyeh Shafizader, who studied friction.

Willka Dadsetan, a ninth-grader who did her project on parents’ effect on grades, did not win.

Her study did find that when parents get involved in a student’s school life, the youngster gets better grades.

But she wrote about her conclusions carefully.

“So, I say that parents do have an affect on your grades,” she wrote in her journal, “unless you have the power to change that, for better or for worse.”

Willka might not have won for her science project, but she might do very well in the diplomacy field.