South Point hosts school fair; County fair set for Feb. 6

SOUTH POINT — The Lawrence County Science Fair is coming up next month and, as it approaches, individual schools throughout the county are hosting school fairs to determine who qualifies for that competition.

In the South Point District, Burlington Elementary School hosted their fair earlier this week, while on Thursday, 43 projects were set up in the gymnasium at South Point Elementary School.

Projects were done by fifth graders and spanned six categories, Tabatha Gordillo, the fifth grade teacher overseeing the fair, said.

Students presented their projects to judges from the community that morning, with awards set for later in the day at a reception with parents.

Projects could be done by individuals, or a team effort, as was the case with Myles Joy and Garrett Hutchinson.

Their project, “Boy vs. Bots,” featured a track, set up with small robot to race around it.

“We’re both very much competitive,” Joy said in their thought process for picking the topic.

They were testing to see if the robot would make it around the track faster than a 10-year-old boy at comparable distance.

Hutchinson pointed out things they learned along the way, such as that the robot would hesitate for small bumps on the track. He said they hypothesized the robot would be faster.

In the end, they found that the car would run six laps in the same timespan in took a boy to run four to six laps.

In individual projects, Nahla Robinson was studying the effect of light on Venus flytraps.

She had three of the plants, which she purchased at Lowe’s, which she assigned to three different lighting conditions: direct light, indirect light and total darkness.

She hypothesized that the plants would do best in the direct light.

However, in her experiment, she found that the indirect light was best, and was an example how students can learn from the scientific process and experimentation.

Taking her findings, Robinson theorized that the plant in direct light was introduced to it too quickly. She pointed out that the conditions in Lowe’s were more like the indirect light that they were accustomed to.

“Things That Go Bump in the Night” was a project by Lyndlee Edwards.

“It’s about how little kids think sounds in the walls and floors of a house come from monsters,” she said.

She said the goal of her experiment was to show those “creepy sounds could surely be explained by science.”

To test this, she said they found spots in a house where there were pops and recorded the sounds.

Then, she and her father built a device with wood and nails, which the heated by a fire, and cooled in a freezer.

The result, she said, is that they found a similar pop to what was heard in the walls and floors.

Edwards had grown quite adept at explaining her work. She remarked to her teacher, after her interview with The Tribune, that she could now do the presentation entirely without flash cards.

Winners in their categories can go on to compete in the county science fair, which is organized by the Lawrence County Educational Services Center, Gordillo said. That event is set for Feb. 6.