Nearly 30 La Jolla students earned top marks in the 72nd Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair, with five of them also named Grand Award winners or runners-up.
This year’s fair was held March 18 at the Balboa Park Activity Center, with an awards ceremony the next day at The Magnolia in El Cajon.
More than $40,000 in prizes were awarded. Top projects advanced to the California Science and Engineering Fair this weekend in Thousand Oaks, while eight Grand Award winners will head to the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair May 9-15 in Phoenix.
In the Greater San Diego fair, Olivia Liu from La Jolla Country Day School weighed the effectiveness of soap and alcohol in achieving healthy skin in the category of microbiology.
“Every day we wash our skin to get rid of the dirt and microbes, and we do so by using soap or alcohol,” said Olivia, a seventh-grader. “We know that alcohol kills bacteria better than soap, so does that mean we should be using alcohol instead of soap? That is the problem I tried to answer.”
Olivia tested bacteria levels on pig skin after washing it with water, soap or a solution with 70% alcohol.
She concluded that soap better preserves “good bacteria” in the short term, which could support skin health by protecting against “bad bacteria.”
That finding and more were published in her final project, “Soap — A Friend or Foe of Skin Bacteria.”
After she was named a Grand Award runner-up, she said “I wasn’t expecting it at all. I was just focused on congratulating my friends and facing what was ahead of me. … I’m so thankful that I got support from my teachers and family members. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.”
Paul Schnabl, an eighth-grader at The Bishop’s School, won a Grand Award for his creation of an Autonomous Robotic Garden for Optimized Sustainability, or ARGOS, in the junior engineering category of electrical, mechanical and robotics.
ARGOS, powered by Raspberry Pi and a Raspberry Pi camera, was made possible through machine learning. Paul trained his project with 25,000 pictures of soil and connected it with an autonomous irrigation system that decides how much water the garden should receive.
“I read a lot of climate change books and I thought the agricultural sector was always pretty interesting, especially here in California, [where] freshwater conservation is a big problem for us,” Paul said.
Over seven days, ARGOS reduced total water usage by 58% and was only about 4% off in its soil measuring predictions, Paul said.
Ethan Hu of Bishop’s won a Grand Award for a project detailing his efforts to make hardware and software solutions for blind or visually impaired people that are more cost-effective, flexible and efficient.
Kayley Xu, also from Bishop’s, won a Grand Award for her project using controlled beam steering to design a “passive, all-dielectric metasurface” for retinal disease intervention.
Joie Green from Muirlands Middle School was a Grand Award runner-up for a project looking to redirect energy with topological metamaterials.
In all, The Bishop’s School led La Jolla campuses with 14 students receiving first-place honors.
Here is a full list of first-place winners at La Jolla schools:
• The Bishop’s School: Madison Chen, Andy Feng, Daniel Guo, Maggie Hao, Ethan Hu, Shrehan Kundu, Baron Li, Emma Liu, Paul Schnabl, Andrew Xu, Kayley Xu, Kristen Yu, Amber Zhang, Chris Zheng
• All Hallows Academy: W. Timothy Morrisey, Mariaan Ariza Castillo, Massimo Gallego, Charlie Martin, Lorenza Peniche, Carissa Robinson
• La Jolla Country Day School: Elizaveta Avdienko, Amanda Bi, Olivia Liu, Amelie Roy, Harper Tilley
• Muirlands Middle School: Joie Green
• La Jolla High School: James Cao
• The Children’s School: Tim Lais ♦