921 Projects Vie for Science Fair Prizes : Education: More than 150 winners are chosen from seventh- through 12-graders. Experiments run the gamut.

Fourteen-year-old Travis Whitlock was disappointed with the data collected from his science project.

He really likes Jimi Hendrix, but to his dismay, he found the birds outside his window prefer Mozart. Robins and finches flocked to a bowl of bird seed when he played the Requiem, but stayed away when Hendrix hammered home a guitar solo.

“Those birds just don’t have any taste in music,” said the eighth-grader at Las Colinas School in Camarillo. “Mozart is OK, but Hendrix can really play the guitar. Next time I’m going to try it with Beethoven and Metallica.”

Travis’ experiment was among 921 at this year’s Ventura County Science Fair, which ended Thursday night with a lengthy award ceremony.

“We have more than 150 winners,” said Dennis Lang, chairman of the three-day fair for seventh- to 12th-graders, pointing to a series of tables lined with trophies. Several children were also awarded scholarships of up to $1,000.

Winners qualify to compete in the California State Science Fair next month in Los Angeles.

This year’s science fair at the Ventura County Fairgrounds drew 953 children, with projects ranging from comparing toothpastes to finding new ways to scare away cockroaches to measuring cosmic rays.

In addition to displaying their projects, students were treated Wednesday to a video conference with astronaut Carl E. Walz.

“The kids got to see that astronauts at NASA are also working on science projects. The only difference is NASA’s projects are bigger,” Lang said. “The whole idea is to stimulate the kids to look around and try to better understand the world around them.”

Jason Krane first got interested in things scientific when he visited Disney World.

“I saw an exhibit on hydroponics and wanted to do an experiment with it,” said the seventh-grader at Medea Creek Middle School in Oak Park. Jason found that a cherry tomato plant grown in water with special nutrients grew far more quickly than in soil.

“Hydroponics is also good because you can do it in the desert,” he said. And Jason found his project had more than one practical use--he plans to eat the tomatoes on hamburgers this summer.

The project displayed by Vishal Patel, a seventh-grader at Los Altos Intermediate School in Camarillo, also had an environmental twist. He was looking for ways to neutralize oil spills with vinegar.

“It helps make materials less hazardous,” said Vishal, a winner of four awards at last year’s fair. “It reduces the number of hydrocarbons.”

Catherine Debnam, an eighth-grader at Los Cerritos Intermediate School in Thousand Oaks, wanted to see how a rat’s living conditions would affect its ability to learn. She placed rats in cages of varying comfort and then placed them in mazes.

“I found that comfort made absolutely no difference,” Catherine said. “The ability to learn is inherited, I think. People who live in small houses can still be really intelligent.”

Oxnard sixth-grader Ben Lopez knew he wasn’t breaking any scientific boundaries with his hand-fatigue measurer, but that wasn’t the point, he said.

“This is my first science fair,” said Ben, of Christa McAuliffe School. “I wanted to learn the scientific method and keep it simple. Now that I’ve got that down, I’ll elaborate on the project for next year. This is a lot of fun.”

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FYI

The Times will publish a list of 1995 Ventura County Science Fair winners in Saturday’s editions.