(2012-07-24) Google Science Fair

The 2nd annual Google Science Fair just ended. Unfortunately the website is horrible - couldn't there be a page with 1-sentence project summaries (or even just titles!?!?) for at least the 15 finalists? So I'll be a bit obsessive.

The 3 winners:*

• 13-14 age category: Jonah Kohn (USA)—“Good Vibrations: Improving the Music Experience for People with Hearing Loss Using Multi-Frequency Tactile Sound.” By creating a device that converts sound into tactile vibrations, Jonah’s project attempts to provide the hearing impaired with an improved experience of music.
• 15-16 age category: IvánHervíasRodríguez, Marcos Ochoa and Sergio Pascual (Spain)—“La Vida Oculta del Agua (The Secret Life of Water).” Iván, Marcos and Sergio studied hidden microscopic life in fresh water, documenting the organisms that exist in a drop of water, and how those organisms influence our environment.
• 17-18 age category AND Grand Prize Winner: Brittany Wenger (USA)—“Global Neural Network Cloud Service for Breast Cancer.” Brittany’s project harnesses the power of the cloud to help doctors accurately diagnose breast cancer. Brittany built an application that compares individual test results to an extensive dataset stored in the cloud, allowing doctors to assess tumors using a minimally-invasive procedure.*

The other finalists: (by age)

• Martin Schneider, Joshua Li, Can You Beat Bob? Studies have shown that in real life, competing with someone increases motivation and performance. The same principle might apply to educational video games. We hypothesized that if a human-like virtual competitor (who we named Bob) was implemented into an educational video game, a student may become more motivated to answer more questions and may even work harder to get correct answers.
• Sakhiwe Shongwe, Bonkhe Mahlalela: Unique Simplified Hydroponic Methods; Can The Method be Adapted for Poor Swazi Subsistence Farmers?
• Alexey Kozlov, Milena Klimenko: My Green City
• Sumit Singh: Vertical Multi-Level Farming to Increase Crop Yields- An Affordable and Feasible Design