Bright Minds, Clever Projects at Science Fair

The idea that females and males have different moral traits might raise the ire of some feminists, but Vanessa Danziger has documented the phenomenon--at least among Turtle Rock Elementary School sixth-graders.

Vanessa’s science fair project, which won the junior division sweepstakes prize Sunday at the Orange County Science and Engineering Fair, used survey results from her Irvine classmates to show that boys make decisions differently from girls.

Boys, the 12-year-old found, tend to make decisions based on a moral calculation of what is right or wrong, while girls usually emphasize how their actions might help or hurt others.

The winning project was unusual not only because it didn’t involve test tubes or Bunsen burners, but also because it was a winning sixth-grade entry in the first year the younger students’ projects have been judged alongside those of seventh- and eighth-graders.

“Here’s a sixth-grader beating out the rest of the junior division,” said Lon Isenberg, one of the sweepstakes award judges. “We were just impressed with the sophistication of her project.”

Vanessa’s prize was one of about 224 handed out in 17 categories Sunday afternoon during an awards ceremony at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa. Irvine public schools dominated the awards, with 78, or more than one-third, just days after 11th-hour donations saved the school district’s science enrichment program, along with arts and music.

The sweepstakes award in the senior division was given to Justin Young, a junior at University High School in Irvine, whose experiment, “Wave Good Bye,” studied the rate at which extremely low-frequency electromagnetic fields decrease over distance.

Bradley Jacobs, former county assessor, judged Justin’s project and said he was intrigued by the attention to low-frequency waves at a time when most research is done on high-frequency waves that can transmit data more quickly in the Information Age.

“What we were looking for is someone who is thinking differently,” Jacobs said. “[Justin’s] subject matter was unusual, and he thought about it in an unusual way.”

Clifford Simon, a senior at University High School, received a scholarship worth $5,000 to study at the Weizmann Institute Summer Science Program in Israel for three weeks. He will join 75 students from around the world and work alongside top researchers.

His winning project examined the particle properties of sound waves.

“It’s nice to put in all that work and get something for it,” the 17-year-old said. He is deciding between UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University and plans to study physics and computer science in college.

Sweepstakes winners in the junior and senior divisions were given medals and $200 checks. First-, second- and third-place winners in the junior and senior divisions of the 17 categories received $100, $50 and $25, respectively.

The sweepstakes awards were announced at the end of the ceremony, and Vanessa and her parents--who knew her project had won an award but didn’t know which one--were preparing to go home empty-handed before her name was finally called.

“I was concerned for her because I thought she didn’t win anything,” said Vanessa’s mother, Lesley Danziger. “At the end, I was comforting her and saying that maybe the judges got confused.”

After going onstage to retrieve her award, Vanessa was still in shock.

“My legs are shaky,” she said. “I can’t wait to tell my grandma.”

The idea for the project, titled “What Would You Do,” started with a math problem Vanessa had to solve for class on decision-making.

“I was just wondering how boys and girls would differ,” she said.

Vanessa’s surveys posed questions such as: “The teacher has sent you on an errand to the office. You notice a $5 bill lying on the ground. No one else is around. Do you keep it?”

Boys were more likely to choose option A on the multiple-choice survey--”No, because that would be stealing”--and girls were more likely to choose option C--”No, because someone might come back to look for it and need it for lunch money.”

Vanessa’s research was firmly grounded in work done by other social scientists on moral reasoning--work she said her father, a political scientist at UC Irvine, helped her find at the library and on the Internet.

But this was not a case of a parent doing all the legwork for a child, science fair judges said.

“The only way you can figure out whether or not the kids did the work themselves is by asking them questions about their projects,” Isenberg said. “If you were conducting an interview with Vanessa by phone, you would assume that she was a graduate researcher in the social sciences, not a sixth-grader.”

Hillary Green was another sixth-grade winner who took first place in the environmental sciences junior division. The 11-year-old used her science-fair experiment to clear up some conflicting information about the health risks of the portable classrooms now prevalent on school campuses.

“I heard on the news that they were worse for you, but my teacher said they were actually better,” she said.

Hillary left out bacteria-collecting Petri dishes in a regular classroom and a portable classroom and, with the help of a microbiologist, found that “there’s more allergen-type bacteria in portable classrooms and more E. coli-type bacteria in regular classrooms,” she said.

“Now I know why I think I have more allergies this year,” said Hillary, who is spending her first academic year in a portable at Brywood Elementary School in Irvine. “I just want [the school] to change the filters.”

Asked how she will use the prize money, she looked at her dad and said, “I think he wants me to put it in savings, but I want to spend it.”