Tuesday, May 25, at 2:45 p.m. Leesville’s biology department held its first annual science fair. About 30 students in the biology class took the opportunity of extra credit by participating in the fair.
The presentations were given in Ms. Dobbins’, Ms. Beaver’s, and Ms. Dotson’s room. Assigned to each room were three judges, who were teachers of a variety of subjects from science to Spanish.
Students displayed a wide variety of projects from “how does yeast affect bread?” to “does coffee help plants grow?” They were required to create an experiment, document it, and interpret the results with graphs and other data.
Each presentation was displayed on a three-fold poster to one judge at a time.The poster had to be aesthetically pleasing and include graphs of data and the procedure used during the experimentation.
Charlotte Galamb, sophomore, did her experiment with coffee and sugar snap peas. “I came up with the idea because I know coffee is a depressant, but it gives lots of energy, so I was curious what it would do to plants.” She “watered” the plants with coffee for two-and-a-half weeks, measuring them everyday. Galamb’s experiment proved that plants do in fact grow better with coffee, instead of water.
The students were given the project to start at the beginning of the semester. Galamb and the others, freshmen and sophomores, worked on the project for about three months. During the months they worked on their experiments and rehearsed their presentations.
Ms. Dobbins and the other biology teachers said the science fair was very successful. She hopes to extend it to the other sciences and bring it back for years to come.
