Nine juniors from Skyline High School have spent the better part of the semester working on scientific projects with mentors from the University of Colorado. They presented the results in a poster symposium at the college on Tuesday.
Amanda Guiliani teaches the STEM program at Skyline High School. Her class begins with freshmen and sophomores who learn the skills and applications STEM careers require. Beginning their junior year, students are encouraged to start developing projects of their own to prepare them for their senior year project which they will develop over the course of the school year.
For the last few years, Guilani’s junior classes have participated in the Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community, or PISEC, with CU mentors. The mentors come to the high school once a week and brainstorm and troubleshoot the juniors’ projects.
“They are getting all this really practical experience with the fellows to figure out how they can take an idea and turn it into a full-blown design and then show the results in a public setting,” Guiliani said.
After a few weeks of streamlining the process, the students present their findings at a high school symposium that invites other high school students from other area high schools.
Emmett Ditslear, Artem Lanten-Wiebe and Mason Gulliksen worked on a project that would allow residential solar panel owners the ability to clean their panels. The trio identified that when covered in dust, solar panels are 60% less effective. They developed a robot that used squeegees to remove the dust, which improve the efficiency of the solar panels.
Carson Manes, Moises Ramirez-Castaneda and Aidan Phelon developed a device that when attached to a car’s muffler, will reduce emissions. The group ran into a snag when the car they used to test the device was involved in a car crash, however, early testing was promising. Those tests showed that the emissions were reduced by an estimated 50% using an N95 mask and heater filters.
These three hope to continue developing their product to fit all cars and to create a filter that is compostable — something that none of the other products of this kind have been able to achieve, Phelon said.
“I’m super impressed with the projects that these kids did in a short period of time — in less than one semester, and they are so varied. I think that the project itself allows kids to really explore interests that they have,” Guiliani said.
