Danielle Boer from St Dominic’s Academy in Newcastle undertook a project to see if playing music in factories would increase workers’ productivity and mood. She undertook the study in factories in Newcastle and Swaziland.
Her finding: Playing music — especially rock music — generates clear and measurable increases in productivity. This research won her a scholarship to the Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Psychology worth $15,000 per year for up to four years.
Alessio Giuricich surveyed nearly 1 700 teenagers for his study into sugar dependence among adolescents. He used a modified scale for determining substance dependence and surveyed teenagers from suburban, peri-urban and rural communities across three provinces.
He was awarded a second place in the behavioural sciences category, as well as first award from Psi Chi — the international honour society in psychology. There were other students who didn’t win anything but produce excellent projects.
Schalk Burger and Peter Raney, of St John’s College in Johannesburg, took their plan for an evapo-gravitational generator to ISEF. The alternative energy generation technology uses the geo-thermal heat found at the bottom of mineshafts (of which we have plenty in SA) to produce electricity in a closed system, keeping environmental degradation to a minimum.
Monique Gerber, of Hoërskool Waterkloof in Pretoria, also focused on energy generation by looking at ways of harvesting energy from mechanical motion — like the movement of a train over a track. “The results show it’s possible to transform mechanical vibration into electrical energy for immediate use and storage, ” she said.
Juan Snyman, of Southdowns College in Irene, created a user-friendly system for creating more secure online passwords. “Passwords on their own are not an ideal solution for authentication on the internet,” said Snyman. “Most people’s passwords are too simple, or they use the same one for all websites.”
The system he developed provides a central location for authenticating to numerous online services, thereby enabling a single sign-on for multiple websites, allowing users to possibly choose one, harder to crack, password rather than numerous, easier to remember, passwords.
Theunis Steyn, of Hoërskool Nelspruit, presented a project that suggests that it is economically viable to build and operate vacuum airships. “The challenge with an airship is that it needs to be strong enough to withstand atmospheric pressure, but light enough to be buoyant,” said Steyn.
Sebastiaan Remmelzwaal from Bishops in Cape Towns had a project which focused on improving food security in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, by finding a sustainable and cost-effective fertiliser to enrich the area’s soil sufficiently for food production. By using old tyres as containers for soil he was able to effectively establish which fertilisers performed better in an area where poor soil quality is a real difficulty.
Du Toit Viljoen (17), of Duineveld High in Upington, invented a new spanner to replace the common pipe wrench. “The problem with the common pipe spanner is that it is adjustable and applies force from only two sides onto the pipe. When the force is too great it can slip and damage the pipe. The safety pipe spanner applies force from four sides and grips tighter if force is increased, thus making it safer and more efficient,” said Viljoen.
Ben Kelly attended ISEF as a guest of Intel