The Wyoming State Science Fair for 6th-12th graders was hosted at the University of Wyoming in the Union Ballroom on March 6. There were 75 students in attendance from different middle and high schools across the state.
In order to participate in the state science fair, students had to place in the top three in their regional fair and submit required International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) paperwork for review to the Institutional Review Board (IRB) before the fair began. Afterward, they had to submit a digital quad chart and 12-slide presentation for judges to preview and present their work on a poster board during the competition.
“The Wyoming state science fair is a really cool opportunity because a lot of times, kids in Wyoming, they don’t have the means to have funded research or have an opportunity to be around like-minded people that just kind of think the same way that they do, or that just get excited about STEM,” Kesler Stutzman, an intern for the Wyoming State Science Fair, said.
“It’s such a cool opportunity to be able to sit there and see kids get so excited and be animatedly talking about their research and their work.
The winners of the state science fair become eligible to win various scholarships to both UW and other colleges across the country.
Grace Zhou, a junior from Laramie High School, presented her work on cancer testing through blood, the abstract for which was published in the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), and will be presenting her work at a conference in April. She hopes to change the world of medicine by opening a private practice after she graduates from medical school,
“I really wanted to create a type of cancer detection that was non-invasive and accessible as well as cost-effective,” Zhou said. “This is detection through the blood. So unlike a lot of invasive procedures, like biopsies, that can be very disheartening, I wanted to create something that can be quick and not as scary.”
“In the future, I would like to see if it could be used for the early detection of multiple cancers, to see if we could catch cancer early,” Zhou added.
Another competitor, Tayshia Safford, is a junior who researched the reliability of eyewitnesses.
“In the first round of interviews, the eyewitnesses seem to be very confident in what they saw. They knew what they saw. They were confident to say that, but as round two started, a lot of them came to me, and they said I don’t remember what I saw, or I don’t really know how this is going to go. A lot of details were lost,” Safford said. “A lot of vague descriptions were given, and it almost seemed like they’re trying to put pieces of a puzzle together that they couldn’t really
remember.”
“I grew up watching a lot of crime shows, and I would always get frustrated because the witnesses brought a lot of details of crimes I literally watched happen earlier in the episode. I got frustrated.
The fair wrapped up on March.7, where they announced the winners who will attend the national science fair in Dallas, Texas, from May 14-17.
