Madeleine Choir School student wins top science award

SALT LAKE CITY — With only a day to prepare the board that would display the results of her experiment, Theyoung Puoy was less than confident about her chances of winning the Diocesan Science Fair, which was held Feb. 25 at the Skaggs Catholic Center in Draper.

Her confidence lowered even more when she had a chance to scope out her competition.

"It was kind of scary at first because I saw a lot of other experiments that looked really, really good, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know about this,’ because I didn’t think my project was that great," she said.

Once the judging started, however, her outlook toward her project changed.

"I felt pretty good about it because they seemed really nice and they seemed really interested," said Puoy, an eighth-grader at the Madeleine Choir School in Salt Lake City. "The first judge gave me a lot of advice, so then when I was talking to the other judges it helped."

Puoy took the advice – about how to present her project more clearly, and additional information she could present orally – and used it to help her win the fair’s top award, the Young Scientist of the Year.

"She was able to present really well," said Patrick Lambert, who teaches 7th- and 8th-grade science at the Madeleine Choir School. "She was able to engage the judges; they were very interested in what she was talking about. Theyoung’s got a great personality and part of that is she was able to hold the judges’ attention [while she went] through all of her methods, her data analysis. She knew her project in and out."

Puoy’s project, "Does light affect the rate at which food spoils?," was the first that she entered in the diocesan science fair, although last year she completed a different food-related experiment for her school science fair.

For her winning project, Puoy put six pieces of meat and six pieces of cheese in a closet for a week. She separated them with a barrier so that three pieces of each were exposed to light, while the others were left in the dark. She then used loupes to collect the bacteria off the spoiled food and place it in a Petri dish. After the colonies of bacteria developed on the agar in the dish, she was able to see which colonies were larger.

Lambert started talking to his students about the science fair projects in September. By November they had chosen their projects and begun their research. This year, in addition to covering basic scientific procedure, he focused on making sure that the students were able to present the analysis of their data and their conclusions, he said.

Although most of the research was complete in January, Puoy faced a crunch preparing her presentation because she was a member of the choir that toured San Francisco Feb. 10-13. She returned home sick, but still had to prepare for her school science fair, which was Feb. 24, with the diocesan fair the next day.

"It says a lot about Theyoung that she was really strong on that second day – showing excitement for the project" at the diocesan science fair, Lambert said.

Despite the tight timeline, Puoy took home not only the top award, but also the overall eighth-grade award, the overall biological science award and first place in eighth-grade biological science.

She and two other Madeleine Choir students, seventh-graders James Yost and Trent Niederee, will be among the 40 diocesan students who will advance to the Salt Lake Valley Science and Engineering Fair.