Two South African teenagers shone during this year’s Intel global school science competition held in May in Los Angeles in the United States.
Seventeen-year-old Danielle Boer, who is in grade 12 at St Dominic’s Academy in Newcastle, won a scholarship worth more than R420 000 and her counterpart from Bishops Diocesan College in Cape Town, Allesio Giuricich, received R17 500 in prize money.
Called the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Isef), the competition featured innovative science projects from about seven million learners in 65 countries. Boer’s submission, which won in the sociology subcategory, looked at how music helped to increase productivity in a local textile factory. She said the objective of her project was to “help better the working conditions of the employees in the knitting department by playing music”.
Said Boer about her project: “For the first two months they [the workers] worked without music and the following two months I played them four different genres of music: classical, pop, rock and African, powered by four big speakers conveniently placed across the shop floor. The outcome of the survey showed they liked pop music because, in that period, productivity shot up by 5%, which equalled 14 688 extra -garments in that period.” She said she had not expected her project to go this far.
“It started as a small school project and I then entered it for the Eskom Expo for Young Scientists. I am really excited about this and so are my parents, fellow pupils and teachers.” Next year, as part of her scholarship, Boer will study industrial psychology at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago.
Sixteen-year-old Giuricich, who is in grade 11, won the special award in the subcategory of the behavioural sciences. He looked at sugar dependence among adolescents and received R7 000. He also won second place in the Intel Grand Awards, earning R10 500.
Giuricich told the Teacher that, in addition to winning the two, “one of the minor planets” would be named after him. “I realised a lot of teenagers consume a lot of sweet things and I wondered if this was a consequence of sugar dependence. I then did a survey in which I interviewed 1 654 learners between the ages of 13 and 18 across the country. The results showed that 56% of them were dependent on sugar,” said Giuricich.
He said he intended to carry the study further by doing “brain imaging with the help of medical personnel to determine the adolescents’ level of addiction to sugar and also identify specific kinds of sweets that they [adolescents] like most”. Boer and Giuricich’s victories came in the same month in which another learner, Luke Taylor, a 14-year-old grade nine learner at the German International School in Cape Town, became one of only 60 semifinalists in Google’s Science Fair global online competition.
Taylor “is passionate about computer science and artificial intelligence”. His project, titled “Programming in pure English” attempts to help robots understand commands written in natural human language. Intel’s head of corporate affairs in South Africa, Parthy Chetty, praised the learners. He said he was excited that South African learners were part of the youth “trying to solve the world’s most pressing challenges through science”.
He said: “South Africa is one of the most advanced countries on the continent with regard to our science competencies and standards. This forms a sound foundation for research and innovation to thrive and make us competitive in the 21st century.”
Learners from California in the United States won the first two prizes and received $75 000 as well as the Gordon E Moore award, named after Intel’s co-founder and retired chairman and chief executive. They developed “a potentially more effective and less expensive cancer treatment that places tin metal near atumour before radiation therapy”