by Adam Colbert
For sophomores Savera Mohammed and Kayla Penniman, the science fair is not an assignment. They have fallen in love with their topic.
Mohammed and Penniman along with two other students competed in the Worcester Regional Science and Engineering fair at WPI on Saturday, March 9. It was the 58th annual fair for both middle and high school students. For Kayla Penniman and Savera Mohammed it was their first time competing at the high school level.
Penniman had competed in the middle school fair, and it was “a really cool experience.” This year, Penniman worked with Mohammed on an experiment to see how the brain can detect emotion based off of an athlete’s facial expressions and body language.
To help me understand the test, they had me take it.They cut out pictures of athletes’ faces, their whole bodies, and their upper body without the head. In some situations, the athletes were winning, and in others they were losing. They had twelve pictures: four full bodies, four faces and four upper bodies. In each category, two were winning and two were losing. The person taking the test must guess whether the athlete won based on their facial expressions or body language.
Mohammed and Penniman recorded each person’s results over the course of a month. They tested 20 people per age group, and the age groups were 13-19, 20-29, and 30 or over. They discovered two things. The older you get, the harder it is to detect emotion through body language. They also found that more people got the correct answer when the face was involved. This makes it easier to understand why I only got one wrong; I am fifteen years old. The one I missed was an upper body only picture.
Brain functioning was not their first idea for a science fair project. Originally, they wanted to test human buffers, but they could not keep human blood fresh for a long period of time.
But when biology teacher Julie Snyder and Penniman found the article about their current project, based on an experiment by Hillel Aviezer, Penniman and Mohammed were sure they wanted to work together on the project. Since they have every class together, they have gotten to know each other well and frequently talk about their experiment and discoveries.
They did not have a whole lot of interest in the science fair at first. In fact, Mohammed was only doing it because she needed to do an experiment anyway for AP Biology. But once they started though, they wanted to finish because of their passion for it.
Penniman is interested in how the results vary based on age, and she is curious about brain functioning. Mohammed is also interested in how the brain functions. She is excited to share her findings with other people and wants to make comparisons with the original experiment.
Some of the challenges they have faced are time management and analyzing data because it has complex formulas. They need to make a lot of graphs, such as how age difference affects one’s results.
Time management has been a challenge because they were not too committed to the project at first. Mohammed says they realized they had to get things done, so they increased time spent on the project. Penniman says there were some long nights because “there’s always something new to fix.”
This team entered the science fair knowing they were going to have a lot of competition. “At the middle school science fair,” Penniman says, “there are really rich private schools. Some kid built a hovercraft.” Also, one girl built an app for the iPhone. They know they’ll have a lot of competition.
Mohammed has different feelings about the science fair. She says she is excited to present findings to other people, but she is nervous and anxious to be presenting to judges. “It’s nerve wracking to know you’re going to be judged,” she says, with that “voice in the back of your mind saying don’t mess up.”
Penniman realized her favorite subject was science because the only classes she enjoys are the science classes. But Mohammed has “always had an eye open for science.” She is a very curious person, and as a kid “science answered my questions,”she says. Her main goal in life is to be a doctor because she loves biology, and she loves helping people.
The hard work paid off as Mohammed and Penniman got fourth place. Sophomores Stephanie Kall and Erica Davis, who also competed, got honorable mention, for fifth place. Both groups will move on to states on May 3.
