Submitted by the San Juan Island School District
On May 18-20, two teams from Friday Harbor High School competed in the Alaska Airlines Imagine Tomorrow Science Fair at Washington State University.
The competition challenges ninth-12th graders to seek new ways to support a transition to future sustainability. Students researched complex topics and then created technologies, design or plans to mobilize behavior.
Teams also forged connections in their communities to create positive change. In this competition, as in life, solutions are limited only by imagination.
The two teams developed projects to improve community sustainability in terms of food, energy, water and resources. Sander Van Hamersfeld, Emmett Carrier and Charlie Zehner developed a project looking at the possibilities of using computer-controlled microfarms to reduce the amount of produce that San Juan Island needed to import. Ayla Ridwan, Kai Di Bona and Raylee Miniken developed a project, with the help of Katie Flemming of Friends of San Juans, as part of a Cool School Challenge through OPALCO. The team worked to increase energy consciousness among students and staff by collecting data on energy usage and habits, analyzing the data, working on initiatives to lower energy use on three campuses and teaching elementary school students about energy usage in their lives.
Each group spent all day on Saturday presenting to engineers, managers, directors and other staff from Alaska Airlines, Boeing, Intron, Puget Sound Energy and other industry leaders. At the end of the day, the work of Ridwan, Di Bona and Miniken on energy use in Friday Harbor High School was selected as the “Best Project From a Newly Participating School” in the schools’ congressional district.
These students showed an amazing ability to communicate their idea, the importance of the idea and the potential impact on the community. Students from the winning teams were awarded a cash prize, certificates of achievement and high praise from the judges on their projects.
This is the 11th and final year of the competition at Washington State University, and the students performed so well that both teams have expressed interest in developing their ideas further and bringing them to the Washington State Science and Engineering Fair next March as a qualifier for the Intel Science and Engineering Fair in 2019.
