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Science fair offers new awards

STUDENTS STILL have a week to get their projects ready to win an award in this year’s Northwest Science and Innovation Society science fair.
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MEGAN GEERAERT and Kalea Raposo show off their project

STUDENTS STILL have a week to get their projects ready to win an award in this year’s Northwest Science and Innovation Society science fair.

And this year, there’s the most awards and prizes ever with nine new awards introduced that will go to the students who make the best project that fits the criteria in that category, no matter what the student’s age.

Those awards will be more available to those who haven’t won before as two science project student winners aren’t able to enter the fair this year.

Megan Geeraert, 12, and Kalea Raposo, 11, entered a project together in the last two science fairs, coming in second place two years ago and first last year in their age group.

Their second-place project was on Green  Cleaning and they won for their oil spill project.

“We always try to be eco-friendly,” says Raposo about their projects.

One year, she did enter a project on her own on pine beetles but prefers to work with Geeraert.

“It’s more fun and easier with two people,” says Raposo, who says science is her favourite class and she’d like to work in science when she’s older.

Geeraert says the pair won’t be entering this year as they’re too busy but they enjoyed working together.

“We’re friends and really liked it,” she said about why the girls did a project together. Besides the research they did doing the experiment, they also did research to decide what their project would be.

“We were looking in science fair project books,” said Geeraert about how they came up with their project ideas.

The projects have always been about interesting topics that they want to know more about, she added.

Some of the new awards this year are the Special Effort Award, which goes to the student who puts the most interest and energy into a project, regardless of whether the project receives any other awards.

Another is the Environmental Awareness Award, which goes to the best project that demonstrates general environmental awareness as it relates to preserving and protecting the environment for people, wildlife and habitat preservation.

And there’s also the annual Gold, Silver and Bronze Awards to the winners in each age category, and the prestigious Best in Fair Award that goes to a student whose project recognizes science and technology excellence.

The NSIS Science Fair for students from kindergarten to Grade 12  takes place March 3 at Veritas Catholic School.