By Thomas Cho, Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, Grade 10
May 31, 2011
The Intel ISEF is the world’s largest international pre-college science competition and this year, Los Angeles proudly hosted the conference. More than 1,500 high school students arrived from all over the United States as well as international regions.
Jui Kummar and Erica Brunson, seniors from Mankato High School in Minnesota, are finalists for a project they have been working together on for the past five months. They began in December of 2010 and since then, have tirelessly worked every day to collect data, improve on their designs, and prepare for the ISEF competition.
Their success in the competition is mainly due to the fact that, “the high school we go to provides us with the best environment, a science lab very few high schools can provide,” Kummar states. The focus of their project has been to obtain data about the performance of wind turbines contingent upon variations in rotor blade design. To achieve this, they used plastic blades of different designs with ranging surface area.
Although this competition has been a high point in their engineering careers, they say that, “This is definitely not the end. There is much more room for improvement.”
ISEF Finalists are selected within the United States, but many international countries are also represented at ISEF conferences annually. Yi Meng Shi, a senior from China, spent over a year for her project on the flow feature around insects and bionic wing based on wind tunnel tests. Unlike Kummar and Brunson, she commutes to a laboratory outside of her high school every day to work on her project.
In preparation for the ISEF competition, she noted that, “I sometimes skipped school to go work on the project. It was a huge sacrifice but I had to do it because the competition date was getting closer.”
Because Shi is attending one of the top high schools in all of China, the High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China in Beijing, she felt even more pressure missing school days. Shi will be attending Beijing University and is currently undecided on her major.
