County Science Research Competition winners celebrated at awards ceremony

On Tuesday, March 18, students in grades 6-12 from across Chester County gathered at the Technical College High School (TCHS) Brandywine Campus for the Dr. Lucy Balian Rorke-Adams Science Fair awards ceremony.

Recently, the Chester County Intermediate Unit (CCIU) coordinated the 36th annual Chester County Science Research Competition (CCSRC), hosted at the West Chester University Student Recreation Center. The two-day event, which included the Dr. Jonas Salk Fair for students in grades 4-5 and the Dr. Lucy Balian Rorke-Adams Fair for students in grades 6-12, gave participants the opportunity to showcase their passion for science. Of the 171 projects entered into the Rorke-Adams Fair of the CCSRC, 108 met the judges’ criteria of a winning project and were announced at the awards ceremony.

During the Rorke-Adams awards ceremony, students eagerly waited to see how they placed in the fair. Each category winner received a ribbon based on their project category and ranking. In addition to category winners, the CCIU also distributed special awards to 15 student winners, totaling $750 in value.

High school students who placed first, second, or third in their category and middle school students who placed first or second will advance to the Delaware Valley Science Fairs (DVSF) held during the first week of April. The DVSF is split into six divisions: grade 12, grade 11, grade 10, grade 9, high school team projects, and grades 6-8.

The top winners who will represent Chester County in the DVSF are as follows:

Atharv Uddi of Downingtown High School East is one of 89 students from the CCSRC who will compete in the DVSF. He won the Spirit of Engineering Award, the Bill and Sue Phifer School and Community Benefit Award, and first place for Best of Division in grade 11 for his project, Search and Rescue UAVs with Image Processing and Machine Learning.

“My project was to build an airplane with a camera inside. It can fly over large areas and use the camera to detect people on the ground,” said Uddi. “For example, if someone was stranded, then search and rescue responders could deploy my aircraft and use it to find people quickly and easily. A team usually takes about four hours to search one square mile of area. My airplane can do it in as little as 30 minutes.”

He went on to explain other practical applications of the project beyond search and rescue, including the ability to survey land. “If you needed to take pictures of a farm to analyze which crops are growing and how they are growing, you could use my airplane for that.”

When asked what he learned by participating in the CCSRC, he explained that his biggest takeaway was a sense of perseverance. “It takes a lot of time and dedication. There was a lot of trial and error to make my airplane work, testing again and again and making the aircraft fly multiple times. There were a lot of crashes and mistakes, but it finally worked out in the end.”

“The Chester County Science Research Competition represents so much more than just an academic event on our calendar. It’s a celebration of our students’ curiosity, innovation, and determination,” said Kathy Gurnee, special events coordinator for the CCIU. “The CCSRC is a culmination of months of dedicated effort on a very specific problem. Students perform background research and employ the scientific method, from constructing a hypothesis, to developing a rigorous procedure, through communicating their results. Most likely they will experience failure along the way; but ultimately, they discover resilience and a sense of scientific achievement.”

To learn more about the CCSRC, please visit www.cciu.org/science-fair.