By Tim Dolan, Lookout Advisor, per Nicole Prince, BHS Science Teacher
On Thursday, April 9, BHS Students Hanna Suzuki and Cindy Yuan had an excellent showing at the Massachusetts Science and Engineering Fair at the Worcester DCU Center. Both entered the competition after conducting lengthy science experiments independently and outside of school.
Suzuki wrote an algorithm that assigns musical notes to stars in a constellation based on their physical properties thereby creating a unique song for each constellation. One application of her work is to allow a person who is blind to enjoy the stars. A judge commented that she had a “very innovative idea and excellent execution”. For this work, she won the second place award from Mathworks ($7500 scholarship) and a spot to compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair in early May.
Yuan researched how environmental factors can degrade pigmentation in paints in an effort to determine how to preserve ancient art. She received this feedback from the judges: “I loved hearing the story of your passion for ancient artwork in the mountains of China led you to design this experiment to find ways to protect them. It is so creative that this real life challenge informed your variables and testing. The computation and analysis you learned to process this complex and often subjective (color) into objective data points through hex analysis is so impressive.”
