Student-created projects were on display Friday at the annual Calgary Youth Science Fair, the country’s largest science fair, in an effort to stimulate curiosity and encourage exploration of science and technology.
“The Calgary Youth Science Fair is all about getting students engaged in science,” said Chuck Buckley, president of the fair. “Letting them know that science is fun and there are great careers in science.”
The event, which is in its 57th year, was held at the Olympic Oval Friday and drew a large gathering of participants from Grade 5 – 12 representing dozens of local schools.
“There are over 100 schools involved,” said Buckley. “There are 1,007 students that are registered at the fair this year and over 750 projects at the fair and 500 judges at the fair which are all volunteers. The entire organization is volunteers.”
Grade 5 students Calla Van Beurden and Kayla Sin, who collaborated on a project testing the memory of horses, were excited and nervous to take part in such a massive science fair.
“My goal is just basically to have fun and learn, and I don’t really care if I place or not,” said Sin. “It’s a really big achievement just to come to city science fair.”
“You learn but it’s also fun at the same time,” added Van Beurden.
Buckley says the entries are not judged solely on the favourable results of the experiments but the process the students followed before reaching their findings.
“We are trying to encourage the scientific method so that they have a good idea, a good question, then they have a hypothesis. They find a way to either inquire about that hypothesis, or run an experiment about that hypothesis, and then draw a conclusion from that that is related to the hypothesis."
All of the students will receive a gold, silver, bronze or participation medal and the winners from the Calgary science fair qualify for the national science fair.
With files from CTV's Stephanie Wiebe
