SAIL students advance to Canada Wide Science Fair
Seven students from the district’s SAIL (Surrey Academy of Innovative Learning) program are heading to the Canada Wide Science Fair after impressive showings at the district’s Science & Innovation Fair and the Youth Sciences Canada Virtual Science Fair (BC/Yukon).
Four projects by SAIL students in Grades 8, 9 and 10 are advancing to the national competition, being held virtually May 16-20:
- Margo Senchenko - Attractive Cat Scratcher
- Farhan Ahmed and Alexander Li - The Methane Recycler
- Nathan Yeung and Charlie Zhang - Lento: Goal-Based Productivity
- Ziyun (Emily) Lin / Ruiyi Sang - Writing a cleaner future with E-Coal
In advance of the competition, the Surrey Board of Education saw several gold medal project presentations from the district’s 55th-annual fair at the April board meeting, including one by Grade 8 SAIL students Elaina Fung and Fayhaa Kafi, highlighting a creative way to reuse Styrofoam.
“They took some recycled Styrofoam and mixed with lemon zest, orange zest, and the chemical reaction solidified the Styrofoam and they were able to mold it into bricks,” said Craig Sutton, the district’s science helping teacher. “They are hypothesizing how this could be used for construction materials – it’s a way to recycle Styrofoam and have a cheap and useful building material.”
Sutton said “innovation” was added to the district fair’s title to encourage students to develop projects that could have a broader social impact. He said he is always amazed by the innovative solutions to current issues that students come up with.
“We want students to take the science and learning that they do through their project and apply it to real-world problems,” said Sutton. “We’re also realizing that a lot of the innovation projects don’t really fit into a traditional science fair judging model, so we’re looking at creating a new category… so that students can do more of an ADST (applied design, skills and technologies) process to create a product or invent something that doesn’t have to be a scientific experiment.
“They still have to do testing and some process of gathering data and making meaning of it, but they don’t have to do an actual experiment with the scientific method. There really are more opportunities for those innovation-style projects.”
The Canada Wide Science Fair starts Monday, May 16 and will be hosted virtually. For more information, click here.
