CWSF 2015 – Fredericton, New Brunswick
The University of New Brunswick played home to over 500 of the brightest minds from across the country this past week as the 54th Canada Wide Science Fair took the city of Fredericton by storm. Over 110 regions from all parts of Canada came together to compete for nearly $1 million in prize monies and scholarships. Two students from Westwood Community High school and two students from Ecole McTavish in Fort McMurray represented the Wood Buffalo region under the supervision of educators Vicki Dawe and Sorin Nita. Linda Guo, Aiman Naeem, Zeel Patel and Dhrumil Shah, represented the top projects from this year’s Wood Buffalo Regional Science Fair held in March at the Syncrude Sport and Wellness Center.
At the CWSF, these students took in scientific workshops and tours of all of the programs and facilities offered at the University of Fredericton Campus, made friends from all over the world, and prepared to showcase their unique and innovative projects in a grueling 8 hour judging round. The intense competition challenged our students and proved rewarding as each finalist brought home a bronze medal. Each of our finalists also received an entrance scholarship of $1000 to Western University located in Ontario.
The Wood Buffalo Youth Science Foundation is extremely proud of these students and our team’s showing at this year’s fair! We would also like to thank all of the community and industry sponsors whose support and commitment to our youth enabled our students to have this life-changing opportunity.
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Linda Guo – Ready, Set, Go! Westwood Community High School Excellence Award – Senior – Bronze Medal Project: Four lives are lost every day in Canada through vehicle collisions. The objective of this project is to design and build an autonomous vehicle system that can robotically override any impairments of the driver using both sensory and passive features, which includes the ability to avoid obstacles, follow the correct side of roads, respond to traffic signals, switch lanes, and be aware of directions. |
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Aiman Naeem – Investigating Reclamation Potential of Native Plants Westwood Community High School Excellence Award – Senior – Bronze Medal
Project: This project focuses on the effective reclamation of sites with heavy-metal contaminated soil, through the use of native plants. Four native species were grown in soil at three different copper-sulfate solution concentrations over the course of six weeks. A total of twelve treatments with six replicates each were observed for germination, growth rates and biomass to produce results that displayed reclamation potential. |
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Zeel Patel Ecole McTavish Junior High Excellence Award – Intermediate – Bronze Medal
Project: The disease everyone knows; and even more people fear: Cancer. It takes millions of lives every year, the majority of cancer related deaths are due to metastasis. This movement is what I targeted; using a novel approach to accelerate the genetic engineering process I was able to discover novel compounds targeting a metastasis organelle named “Invadopodia” and it’s protein MT1-MMP, ultimately fighting cancer. |
