Friday, February 10, 2006

 

Third Place!

It is that time again for the annual Science Fair at the local elementary schools. This is not required although students are encouraged to participate.

Devin decided he wanted to do a project and after we googled the internet for ideas, he choose to test the strength of wet paper towels.

For nearly 10 days, after I had given him a hint sheet that told what the title was, what the purpose was, what a hypothesis was, it was a common refrain around here "Devin, let me see what you have done on your science project."

At almost zero hour, two days before it was due, Devin seemed to realize that the information was not going to suddenly appear on the paper until he wrote it down. Naturally, I was accused of not caring if he failed since I would not "help" him (that means that I didn't offer to do the project for him and make it really nifty cool).

We made a trip to the store to select the victims of the experiment and chose 5 brands at random. The paper towels Devin tested were: Sparkle, Bounty, Brawny, Mardi Gras and Decorator Towels (store brand).

I found a font that looked cool and printed out his headers and then Devin typed all his data in to print out. He used paper towels as the background on his board and with about 16 hours to spare, he was finished.

His cutting was a bit sloppy, things were not glued on straight, his coloring looked a bit quickly done so I congratulated him on finishing it and warned him to not expect to place since there were a lot of good projects out there. (Kaitlyn was in a similar boat and was testing the unpopped popcorn kernels of microwave popcorn)

Due to scheduling of other things, we could not make it to the Science Fair to hear the winners announced. A friend who was there emailed me to tell me that Devin, our own little procrastinator, won 3rd place in his grade!

For those interested, here is the breakdown:

1. Bounty held 547 pennies while wet
2. Brawny held 370
3. Sparkle held 196
4. Decorator Towels held 175
and Mardi Gras brought up the rear with 146 pennies.

posted by Devin's Mom 5:17 PM