Senior Projects Encourage Students To Explore Interests

By Laurie Borst

Nine students presented the results of the work they did this year on their Senior Projects on April 9 and 10 in the Newtown High School lecture hall. The Senior Project course is open to juniors and seniors.

Students choose a topic of interest to research, and need to be self-motivated for this course. They develop skills that they will need when going off to college, explained Peg Ragaini of the Career Center.

Scholarships are available for students who choose to do a project, specifically the Barton Weller Foundation offers scholarships for music, education, and health care.

The students who presented were Alan Korth, Rebecca Reed, Ian McChord, Lindsey Greene, Jake Rebb, Rob Simone, Aron Fay, Dayton Horvath, and Jake Burg.

Alan Korth is a senior planning to study mechanical engineering in college. He designed a bike for his project, Obsession Downhill Bikes Project. He had been a downhill biker for five years. The sport entails taking a bike up a ski lift and riding back down the mountain on what are ski trails in the winter time.

These bikes need special front and rear suspension. Most have an aluminum frame that is light and strong. The bikes have disc brakes like a car and large knobby tires.

Alan sought to design and build a downhill bike with a frame that exceeds standards in strength, suspension, and performance. Frames cost about $2,000 and last only two years. Alan wanted a steel frame since steel is stronger than aluminum. The bike he designed was only a half-pound heavier than aluminum frames.

He used CAD 2-D and 3-D models, performed finite element analysis, using physics, graphs, and leverage ratio plot. He created dimensions, drawings, parts lists, tools and materials lists. He consulted with Tier One Machining of Newtown and E-machine shop.

He learned welding and how to build a jig, hosted multiple online forums, posted online photos, and spoke with other young people and engineers. He is looking into the patentability of his bike.

Neural Networks

Rebecca Reed is a junior who studied Neural Network Learning and Language Translation. She first became interested in AI (artificial intelligence) in eighth grade. Computers and linguistics are also of interest to her.

The computer is a manufactured processing device that resembles the brain in function. Data moves through input neurons to processing neurons to output neurons. She reports many applications for her work, including NASA, the military, and handheld games.

She learned about areas of the brain such as Wernicke’s area, responsible for grasping word meaning, and Broca’s area, which handles grammar and syntax. She chose to investigate picture recognition networks and worked through several levels of neural network complexity.

She hoped her work would lead to a better online translator that could be used for in-field handhelds, cellphones, etc.

Rebecca took the Applied Research Course last year where she took a basic look at neural networks. She will repeat senior research again, this time looking into how neural networks can be applied to robotics video and image recognition.

A Novel Approach

Jake Burg is a junior who has been passionate about writing since he was a little kid, by his account. His work on this project became The Wanderer: A Novel.

When he was 12, he wrote his first novel. Looking back, he finds it rather childish. He got an idea for new story, inspired by Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series. The question he was exploring was, are you human if you lose your memories? He said he is intrigued by what a person has on the inside.

He created Warren, a character with no memories. Warren never stays in a place longer than 24 hours. He is compelled to move on. The scenery in the book is a reflection of what is in Warren’s mind. Jake is trying to answer the question of what a person is when everything else is gone.

Jake wrote 160 pages, which he said, equals about 220 book pages. He had to cut this down to 120 pages. He worked with local writer Rachel Basch.

“Writing is the first step,” he said. “Then comes the editing. This was hard to do. You think what you wrote is it. As soon as I began, I discovered it was an exciting process.”

During his presentation, he read the beginning and ending passages of the story. This is the first half of the book. He hopes to finish the second half by the end of summer, and then find a publisher.

Faster Testing

Dayton Horvath, a junior, developed a Coliform Detection System that can identify E. coli contamination quickly. Current procedures for testing start with a culture that takes a minimum of 24 hours to provide results. He hoped to find a better way that could be used at beaches.

Dayton designed and built the instrument. He began with a T4 bacteriophage specific to E. coli. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect E. coli. He used genetically engineered phages provided by a university in Japan.

By using the bacteriophage, he was able to inject fluorescent green protein (GFP) into the bacterial DNA. His device plugs into a computer and provides a readout of fluorescence measurement that shows how much E. coli is present.

His device can provide results in as little as two hours. Traditional tests require one to three days to grow the culture and identify E. coli through traditional methods. His device can be used for a preliminary field test.

Dayton learned to machine the plastic. He drilled holes and sanded the parts. He performed a serial dilution to test sensitivity of his machine. He found it could detect down to 37 cells per milliliter. At 200 cells/ml swimming is prohibited. He is doing further testing for food-based contamination.

Current tests require fluorescent microscopes for analyzing the cultured E. coli, with a cost of $20,000.

His device cost $100 to make.

Frank LaBanca was his mentor. Dayton took applied science research last year with Mr LaBanca. This year, he entered the Science Horizons competition, earning second place in the Physics Division. At the Connecticut Science Fair, at Quinnipiac University this spring, he again took second place. He will be going to the International Science and Engineering Fair in Albuquerque, N.M., on May 13, one of five Connecticut students attending.

He is looking into a patent.

What To Wear

Jake Rebb has started his own clothing company, Trees JR. He designs and screen prints T-shirts. His company is socially conscious and all products are inspired by life, art, and music.

He will donate ten percent of his profits to relief efforts in Darfur. He has made shirts for bands and designed sweat pants for youth group.

Jake worked with SCORE mentors, retired businesspeople. He plans to extend the project beyond the four-month semester, planning to develop it into his own business.

An entrepreneur by his owned description, he will attend Housatonic Community College in fall.

Creating Characters

Lindsey Greene wrote The Sculpture: a play of monologues in one act. Lindsey spent the first half of the course writing her play, and the second semester, she staged the play with student actors.

Lindsey chose to explore the uncommon genre of monologue plays because she wanted to learn to write characters through their own eyes. “Drama is meant to be a reflection and exploration of life and the world around us.

“My characters demonstrate both eagerness to tell their stories and hesitance for fear of failure or rejection. These tendencies are very human, and I loved learning to depict them,” she stated.

Lindsey’s play was performed at Newtown High School with proceeds benefiting Canine Advocates of Newtown.

Photography

Aron Fay chose to work with photography. What he produced was a series of photographs of the Chinese New Year. He had started out planning to take experimental photographs depicting the transient nature of time and movement, but his mentor directed him to focus on a certain group of people. He decided to photograph Chinese culture.

After several attempts to capture the people, he finally found his focus on a group of children during the New Year’s festivities. His work will be displayed in the high school.

In Gear

Rob Simone designed an internal transmission for a downhill bike. This product encloses the bike’s derailleur, cassette, and main sprocket that protects the parts from water, dirt, and rocks. It also strengthens the structurally weak derailleur by preventing impact with objects.

Rob learned a lot about the engineering involved in designing such a device. He learned how derailleurs work, where they are weakest, etc.

He plans to continue his research and design a frame, and offer the gearbox and frame at affordable prices.

Let It Snow

Ian McChord is an avid skier. He loves winter and snow, and wanted his own ski hill. Ian also enjoys snow skating, which is similar to snowboarding but the board is smaller and has no straps. To realize his dream, he designed a backyard snowmaking machine.

He created a video of his snowmaking efforts in his yard for Fox 61’s Student News. Ian has taken Video Production 1, 2, and 3 at the high school. He decided to use the news report format for the contest.

In his write-up for the project, Ian stated, “This furthers my knowledge of new reports and I think it makes snowmaking more visible for others who want to try and build their own. The project has really helped me in creating a news report that I am proud of and can have in my stock library to show diversity in my filmmaking.”