Several young Sudbury scientists are coming home from the 2023 Canada-Wide Science Fair with some hardware. Seven area students took part in the fair, which was held in Edmonton, Alberta May 14-19.
Aaryan Harshith, a Grade 12 student at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, won a silver excellence award in the senior category for his project “LightIR: An Intraoperative Probe to Enhance Tumour Resections.”
His project is a handheld surgical cancer detection probe he created. While surgery is one of the leading treatments for cancer, millions of these procedures lead to cancer recurrence because surgeons leave behind undetectable traces of tumour in their patients.
LightIR operates on the principle of spectroscopy, differentiating between cancerous and healthy tissue based on their unique responses to light.
Arthur Queiroz and Thomas Mullaly, who are Grade 8 students at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, won silver excellence awards in the junior category for their project “Can worms be part of the Styrofoam Pollution Solution?”
Using worms, a known weakness to the substance, the pair discovered that superworms could consume more styrofoam than hornworms, waxworms and mealworms.
Ben Kawa, also a Grade 8 student at Lo-Ellen Park Secondary School, won a bronze excellence award in the junior category for his project “Driver Wake Up!”
He engineered a device using artificial intelligence that detects when drivers have fallen asleep behind the wheel. Programming language was used to train the device and a USB camera was added to create a livestream. Once the device detects that a driver has fallen asleep, an alarm goes off to wake them.
Maggie Polischuk, a Grade 8 student at Marymount Academy, also won a bronze excellence award in the junior category for her project 'Steer Clear' The Break-Away Steering Wheel!”
During car accidents, drivers are at risk of serious hand and wrist injuries as a result of the force applied by the hands on the steering wheel at the time of impact.
Polischuk’s project involves an invention of a steering wheel whose outer ring will dislodge from the steering column, via retractable solenoids, at the instant when the force of a car crash is detected by on-board sensors.
In doing so, the hands and wrists will be protected from impact and injury. A working model of the design was created in the process of executing this project.
Along with medals, the local students also took home a number of entrance scholarships to Canadian universities.
Marymount Academy Grade 8 student Victoria Leigh and Collège Notre-Dame Grade 10 student Mikella Morin also participated in the Canada-Wide Science Fair this year.
Full results from the Canada-Wide Science Fair are available online here.
