Three Boulder County students win best in show at regional science fair

Mar. 12—Broomfield High School senior Kaviya Barathi Chidambaram wanted to research microplastics and was working with a research mentor with experience with anemones.

She ended up combining the two, designing an experiment that involved feeding microplastics to anemones in tanks she kept at school to see if the plastics accumulated and would be passed on to predators.

The anemones proved trickier to work with than expected, requiring her to make five attempts and change her methods to come up with a viable experiment. She ended up using four different concentrations of microplastics, which she created using 3D filament and a food processor, in her fifth round.

"It was definitely the full experience of the scientific method and process," she said.

Through dissections, she determined that the microplastics not only accumulated inside the anemones, but also attached to their tissue — a "depressing" result that suggests microplastics may act the same as heavy metals that end up in the fish that people eat.

Her project recently won best in show at the senior level at the annual Corden Pharma Colorado Regional Science Fair, held at Boulder's Platt Middle School in partnership with the Boulder Valley School District.

While Chidambaram's project also qualified for the state and international science fair, she's not planning to continue with her project. She plans to major in environmental science, but is looking to focus on policy instead of research.

"The science fair was a really cool opportunity," she said. "I could explore science research on my own terms and work with a researcher already in the field as a mentor."

Altogether, 18 projects in the senior division qualified for the upcoming state competition, as did 14 junior division projects.

Two Peak to Peak Charter School students — Amrita Saini and Alexandra Flint — also qualified for the international fair in the senior division. Saini won first place in the environmental engineering category, while Flint took first in physics and astronomy.

Amrita, a junior at Peak to Peak who plans to major in environmental science or a similar field, said her project builds on one she entered in last year's fair. Her original idea came from a trip to India, where she saw two problems: large air pollutants, such as CO2, as well as inequities in lighting access.

To solve both issues, she wanted to use bioluminescent and photosynthetic algae, reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations through photosynthesis and providing a light source with bioluminescence that's independent of infrastructure and fossil fuels.

Last year, she tried to apply the algae to curtains to create photosynthetic textiles. But she found that fabrics didn't work well, so she decided to test hydrogels for this year's project. Her testing found that hydrogels weren't a good choice, either. Instead, she found another material that did work, a film made from agar-agar and glycerin.

"There was a lot of trial and error," she said.

She said challenges included figuring out how to care for the algae without access to a lab and having to teach herself new skills in a short amount of time. In the future, she said, she wants to test more materials.

"I am really passionate about my project, and I think its potential applications are very interesting," she said. "There is so much potential with science to improve people's lives, which I think is very inspiring."

In the junior division, Charlie Danko, an eighth grader at Longmont's Flagstaff Academy, tied for best of show with eighth grader Grace Xue of Boulder's Summit Middle School. Both plan to compete at the state science fair.

Charlie built a robotic arm prototype, with a goal of creating an affordable robot that could be used in dangerous factories. He used a CAD computer program to design the arm, then used a 3D printer to make the majority of the parts.

"I really like mechanical engineering, software engineering and electrical engineering," he said. "I wanted a way to combine all three and maybe help people at the same time. I researched, and this is what I came up with."

While he had some experience with robotics, he said, it wasn't with anything "as big or complex as the robotic arm." He ended up remaking about 300 3D printed pieces to get it to work as he well as he wanted.

"I went through many iterations of the robotic arm and just changing small things that didn't work in the previous design," he said. "I was very happy with how it turned out."

Grace said she entered the science fair because she likes researching and finding results. She came up with her idea to look at soil issues in the Marshall Fire area after hearing an air quality warning from Alexa, researching it and finding that Boulder County found no significant air quality or soil issues in the burn area after debris removal.

"I was curious about it," she said. "I wanted to find out more."

For her project, she grew nematodes treated with soil from outside the fire burn area, soil that was in a location that burned and soil close to, but not affected, by the fire. Then she tested the nematodes.

"There was a difference between the soil group and the control groups, but I would need to do further testing to make sure there's actually a significant difference," she said.