Students Experience Canada-Wide Success at National Science Fair

Four DSBN secondary school students have some new hardware to display after an impressive showing at the Canada Wide Science Fair (CWSF) in May. Three students from Grimsby Secondary and one student from Laura Secord Secondary made the trip to Fredericton, New Brunswick to take part in the Fair.

Nicolaas Doyle’s project entitled “Experiments in Collective Robotics,” earned him a $1,000 scholarship to Western University, a Bronze Medal and the Intermediate Challenge Award. Doyle’s project investigated whether a collective advantage exists in a group of primitive robots due to stigmergy. “In other words, I investigated whether the work completed by two robots could be more than twice the work of one,” said Doyle, Grade 9.

Grade 10 Grimsby student Lucas Penny devoted his work to Alzheimer’s research. Hi project, “Rhomboid Protease 4 mRNA Expression in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer’s Disease.” With his work, Penny earned a bronze medal in the intermediate division and a $1,000 scholarship to Western University.

Laura Secord’s Holly Philbrick earned her trip to the CWSF on the strength of her work “Clarifying the Function of Vitamin E.” Philbrick, a Grade 12 student, earned a bronze medal in the senior division and $1,000 entrance scholarships to the University of Ottawa and Western University.

Grade 11 Grimsby Secondary student Ben Friesen’s project “Improving Crypto: A Novel Smartphone Based Entropy Generator,” earned him the Oracle Academy Award for outstanding project in the systems software category and a $5,000 cash award. “We all unknowingly use random numbers every day. Unfortunately what we usually call random numbers are very rarely random,” said Friesen. To solve this problem, he developed a smartphone app that generates truly random numbers.  

Ben was also chosen to participate as part of Team Canada at the International Science and Engineering Fair, which took place from May 10-15 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.