Kids Discover Fun and Science at District Fair

The little boys giggled madly at the science project explaining how babies develop in the womb.

“Oh brother,” said one girl, as the boys signaled more peers to take a peek at a booklet containing a drawing of a pregnant woman.

For the students of Briggs School District, snuggled between lemon groves and flower fields in an unincorporated area near Santa Paula, Tuesday’s science fair was about discovery and an opportunity to gloat over accomplishments.

More than 400 students from kindergarten through eighth grade roamed the auditorium at Briggs School and craned their necks to peer at the more than 200 exhibits.

“I won fourth place,” one child proudly proclaimed to another. “Well I won first,” his classmate responded.

While youngsters from Olivelands School, which includes kindergarten and first and second grade, participated in group projects--including one espousing a theory on how the dinosaur became extinct--each student from Briggs’ third- to eighth-grade classes came up with an individual experiment.

“Since I got older I started thinking more and tried harder,” said Priscilla Andrade, 13, who conducted an experiment testing which soda acts as the best cleansing agent for grimy pennies. “I wanted to do something on my own and not out of a book.”

In the booths, students displayed the results of experiments: everything from testing which cheese grows mold the fastest to which batteries last the longest. Others conducted more complex experiments, such as creating a spectroscope to explore the theories of light diffraction.

Pointing to the small window on his homemade spectroscope, Michael Sanchez, 11, explained how it all works. “There’s a diffraction gradient so when you look here it makes the light spread out like a prism.”

It seems, however, that students were drawn time and time again toward Tara Harmon’s booth, which outlined how babies develop. Students, especially the younger ones, appeared fascinated by the photocopies of the embryos. “It looks like a snail,” said one child pointing at a picture of an embryo curled up inside the womb.

In the end, Briggs Principal Sara Whalen-Evans said that she hopes that the science fair, aside from teaching students how to think, makes science more appealing for them.

“I myself enjoy seeing them being proud of something to do with science, and having them learn science isn’t something that makes you a nerd-like kid, that it’s cool to do,” she said.