Fair Is Fertile Culture for Budding Scientists

This year’s Ventura County science fair projects range from the arcane to the whimsical: Does vitamin A slow cancer? Can rubber bands reduce earthquake damage? How friendly are customers at Macy’s?

These were the topics of some of the 1,200 projects entered in this year’s fair, sponsored by the Ventura County superintendent of schools office and held at the Ventura County Fairgrounds. The event began Wednesday, and winners will be announced today.

Fair director Morley Cohen said the event this year recorded the most entrants in its 44-year history, and the greatest number of participants in seventh through 12th grades in the state.

“Today was wonderful,” Cohen said. “It’s all about fostering interest in the field of science.”

For the first time last year, Cohen hooked up with the University of California’s Cooperative Extension Service to help build a bridge between professionals and young Albert Einstein and Madame Curie wannabes.

This year, 85 industry experts--mostly in agriculture--presented demonstrations of their work to the kids, most of whom were thrilled to take home a tomato plant and tell their folks they milked a cow.

Getting jazzed about science--and having students grow up to be scientists--is a big thrill for Cohen, a science teacher at Moorpark’s Mesa Verde Middle School.

“Many students come back to me and tell me their whole life’s vocation is due to their science project in the fifth or seventh grade. . . . That’s what any science teacher wants to hear,” he said.

Although he said he wasn’t sure he would grow up to be a scientist, 13-year-old Travis Womer of Camarillo’s Los Primeros Structured School said he enjoyed working on this year’s project: determining whether horses that live outside collect more bacteria on their rumps than those who live inside stables.

“People at the stable I ride at are always asking if horses stay cleaner inside,” he said.

After swabbing 10 horses and collecting their bacteria in petri dishes, Travis discovered that, indeed, horses that were less exposed to the elements carried fewer bacteria.

Although all the displays were affixed to neat cardboard easels and featured computer printouts of procedures and conclusions, the projects were of varying sophistication.

Mary Schlegel of Santa Clara Elementary School earned a judge’s attention with her earthquake project. She built two cardboard houses, one on the ground and one suspended from a framework of rubber bands. She hit the ground underneath both houses with a hammer and determined the suspended house better absorbed the shock.

In a project to discover how to battle cancer, Mesa Verde’s Ricky Panaro, whose project won top prize at his school, injected sunflowers with carcinogens and then nurtured the flowers with either vitamin A, vitamin E, garlic or fish oil. He found that vitamin A helped the most in reducing the growth of disease and that the other products helped a little.

Curious about human nature, Garric Nahapetian of Moorpark’s Chaparral Middle School held the door open for 100 Macy’s customers to see how many would say thank you.

Although this young social scientist had high hopes, the results were disappointing. Only a minority offered thanks, prompting Garric to theorize they wanted to get to a sale or beat the crowds.

But Garric was right about the project’s second hypothesis: More women offered thanks than men.