Visiting the Taiwan International Science Fair

On my last day in Taiwan, my Tumblehome Learning business partner Barnas Monteith brought me to visit the Taiwan International Science Fair. Barnas himself won multiple state, national, and international science fairs for his work on dinosaur egg proteins when he was in high school, so he's a good guide.

In the National Taiwan Science Education Center, high school students from 17 countries displayed their posters and talked about their scarily sophisticated projects. Usually the posters were in Chinese but the abstract was in English, so I could get at least a sense of the topic. I spent some time looking at two projects analyzing satellite data. One used Taiwan Formosat satellite data to look at sudden temperature changes in the stratosphere. It turns out that around January and February of each year, there's a sudden temperature spike of about 20 degrees Celsius in the stratosphere above the northern hemisphere. It reaches a maximum around 30 kilometers above the earth. A pair of girls investigated how this temperature change vary with altitude and latitude; oddly, it doesn't seem to happen at all in the southern hemisphere. Why does it happen, and why just up there? Why in mid-winter? It may be something about ice suddenly reflecting more heat from earth back into the atmosphere.

A second project used NOAA (National Ocean and Atmospheric Association) satellites to investigate signals of air temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere overlying last year's Japanese earthquake and tsunami. A trio of boys compared the signals from the day of the tsunami to the day before. They found a very distinct discontinuity at the time of the tsunami, propagating outward. Basically they were modeling how a tsunami could be detected and tracked using satellite data, giving hours of warning time.

A third poster, which I didn't visit but Barnas told me about, demonstrated a device blind people could insert into their mouth in order to "see." Cameras feed signals into electrodes on the tongue, and blind subjects learn how to interpret the prickling of their tongues well enough to be able to maneuver through the obstacles of an unfamiliar environment.

These were only three projects out of hundreds that crossed the fields of mathematics, biochemistry, physics, chemistry, energy, bioengineering, geology, and lots more. The kids all looked young, spiffed up, and friendly, and they loved explaining their projects in a tumble of words that definitely moved faster than my ability to comprehend. I had to just wander off nodding and muttering to myself that these kids are really, really smart and are going to make great contributions to the world someday.

Metaphors at the State Science Fair

Here is a selection of the tasty similes and metaphors middle school students from the Massachusetts State Science and Engineering Fair contributed today to the Mistress of Metaphor's pot (Students pick up a prompt and complete it in this activity related to my book Lost in Lexicon):

I sat down and cried like... a river flowing down after a big melt.
Annoying as... a dog barking in the middle of the night.
Tall as... a skyscraper looming over a city.
The setting sun was... like an orange Jello over the horizon.
My bed at the end of the day was... messy and unclean like after a tornado. [We did have tornadoes in Massachusetts this week.]
My old dog panted like... an old train exhausted from travel.
Cold as... winter's frost infested breath.
The setting sun was... a falling fiery red cannon ball the size of the moon.
Dark as... a night alley.
We ran out of there like... a herd of wild buffalo being chased by Indians.
I sat down and cried like... a baby that just had a shot.
The night sky was... ominous as a wizard lifting his cape.

Three hundred middle school kids, selected from their school science fairs all across the state, attended the state science fair today. They were a very diverse group, about equally divided between boys and girls, with a good representation of black, white, Hispanic, East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern students. I saw projects on using pheromones to trap males of invasive crab species; testing how far a soccer ball flies when it's inflated to different pressures (and struck by a mechanical foot); testing what characteristic of a glass determines its resonant frequency, and many more. There were bubbles, sugary drinks, music played to growing plants, solar-powered hydrolysis, and a model of tide power.

All of this, and they were also good with words. I left feeling proud of Massachusetts students and optimistic about the prospects for innovation and discovery among the rising generation.