Saint Olaf Science Fair

Courtesy of St. Olaf School  

BOUNTIFUL — An extensive array of student science projects filled the McNamara Center at Saint Olaf School for the annual science fair. "What’s the Best Way to Make Cement?," "Can it Float? Density and Shape," "Does Matter Really Matter?" were just a few of the ideas presented by the Grades 4-8 science students of Jeriel Turner.

Students were able to choose from a variety of categories and each was responsible for creating their own project, forming a hypothesis, and using scientific analysis to test that hypothesis. They then constructed a visual example of their experiment, wrote a detailed presentation about their findings, presented their findings and offered a detailed explanation of their project, which included answering questions from the judges.

Judges were provided by Ron Valcarcy’s second-year science students from Salt Lake Community College. Valcarcy’s students have judged the St. Olaf science fairs for almost 20 years. Valcarcy and his students commented on how well put together, well written and well presented all the projects were this year.

Overall winners were: third place, BayLa Anderson, "Solar Oven Cooking;" second place, Adam Mulder, "What is the Best Acne Medicine?;" and first place, Ethan Gruis, "How Temperature Affects the Strength of a Magnet."

For the winning project, Ethan tested magnets of various temperatures with his own homemade Gauss Meter and determined that warmer magnets have less strength than colder ones.