With learning, nothing beats a good experiment

 

It started as a classroom assignment for Darla Sherwood's science class at Tsé Yí Gai High School.

Instead of taking a semester final, Sherwood's students chose to build science projects, and some of those projects ended up as entries in the 6-12 grades division as part of the 2010 Navajo Nation Science Fair held Feb. 25 and 26.

Like many of the 12 students from Tsé Yí Gai, this was Vaughan Sandoval's first time entering a science fair.

His project was electroplating, the process of using electrolysis to coat a metal object with a thin layer of another metal.

"It was a bit hard for me to do but I finished it," said Sandoval, 16, while awards were being handed out, signing through an interpreter.

Sandoval, who is deaf, signed his response through an interpreter. But his disability proved to be no obstacle when it came to building his project, which took him three weeks to build.

The difficult part was not the construction, he said, but understanding terms like "negative charge" via American Sign Language.

With guidance from Sherwood and sign language interpreter Anthony Beaver, Sandoval figured it out, completed his project and earned an "A" for it.

"He chose electroplating because it looked fun," Sherwood said.

Sherwood said her class did such a good job with the science projects that she plans to assign another one at the end of this semester.

"One of the points I wanted all the kids to make is that there is no such thing as a bad hypothesis, what you need to do is either prove it or disapprove it," she said. "All you need is determination and imagination."

The connection between experiment and knowledge was evident throughout the competition at the Diné Education Center. The first day of the fair focused on science projects from K-5 students.

Teacher Lyne Wayne offered her perspective while waiting outside the conference room for the judges to finish.

Wayne, who teaches fifth and sixth grades at Lake Valley Navajo School north of Crownpoint, was chaperoning the winners from her school's science fair.

Such academic contests can boost students' self-esteem and contribute to their learning because they see examples from fellow students, she said.

Another teacher waiting for the judging to finish was William Barber of Chi-Chil-Tah Jones Ranch School, located south of Gallup.

Barber said he pushes his students to be curious about the world and to learn all they can from science.

"I really didn't have a good teacher growing up," he said. "I promised myself that I would be the teacher I never had."

Two of his eighth-grade students, Duanna Skeet and Kenisha Yazzie, stood next to their project, "Mechanics of Teeth."

Sitting on the pair's table was an assortment of plastic skulls that they borrowed from Barber's classroom. They used the skulls - arranging from a saber-toothed tiger to a Texas tortoise - to showcase the variety of teeth found in nature. The students learned that teeth have evolved to suit the food eaten by a species.

As part of their project, Skeet, 14, and Yazzie, 13, sawed off the jaw of a horse's skull to examine its teeth.

"We had fun doing our project and we found out a lot about teeth," Skeet said.

Emily Lee-Allen, an eighth-grader from Tsé Bit'Aí Middle School in Shiprock, treated attendees to a fun project called "Blind Soda Taste Testing."

Lee-Allen's project was an experiment to find out how many students can correctly identify three brands of soda by taste testing. She had 19 students test taste Coke, Pepsi and Big K cola.

In her hypothesis, Lee-Allen, 14, predicted that 80 percent of the students would be able to identify all three sodas correctly.

"Most of them knew it, others got it wrong or they mixed it up," she said. Her results showed at 84 percent recognized the taste of Coke, 42 percent knew Pepsi when they drank it, and 53 percent could identify the Big K brand of cola.

Other fun projects were the "Frybread Investigators" and those involving homemade volcanoes and lava lamps.

Sixth-grade students Lashonda Jones and Tsosie Warren posed the question, "Which brand of paper towels absorbs the most liquid?"

Jones, 12, and Warren, 11, both from Montezuma Creek Elementary School in southern Utah, tested the absorbent power of Bounty, Sparkle and a generic brand of paper towel by placing one sheet of each brand into 100 milliliters of water.

The results showed that Bounty absorbed 15 percent of the liquid, Sparkle absorbed 1 percent, and the generic towel absorbed 0.5 percent.

Inspiration for the pair's project came not from the classroom but from the television.

"We saw it on a commercial and wanted to test it out for ourselves," Jones said.

As the competition paused for lunch, Douglas Davis spoke to the students about Garrett Yazzie, the Piñon Chapter eighth-grader who gained national attention with his award-winning science project in 2006.

Davis, Yazzie's friend and former teacher, told the students that Yazzie was an average student who had an interest in learning about science. Yazzie's interest has carried him from science fairs to enrollment at a college prep school, where he is now a senior, in Orchard Lake, Mich.

In addition, his story captured the attention of Hollywood, and in 2007 his family received a new home courtesy of ABC's "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition."

"Science fair is not something you play around with, it's the beginning of something that can change your life," Davis told the students. "Get involved with science, find out what it can do for you and don't stop here."

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