SIERRA RANDALL, the overall winner of The Dalles Middle School Science fair, shows off her ribbon to her mother. Her project, about the processes food goes through as it molds and rots and her splashy board were chosen over the several hundred other entries by sixth graders at TDMS. Sam Craig photo

Science Fair at TDMS brings out inner Einsteins
Sixth graders make science fun with inventive experiments and hypotheses

By SAM CRAIG
The Chronicle

     It wasn’t such a long time ago that science was the promise for men of noble birth. The idea that a general curiosity and just a bit of pluck could make scientists out of any one of us would have been enough to rumple the starched shirts of the scientific establishment even less than 100 years ago.
     As a testament to that notion, each and every sixth grader at The Dalles Middle School became a scientist, if only for a day, at the school’s Science Fair.
     In the middle school’s gymnasium, packed wall-to-wall with science projects in the form of tri-fold posterboard, sixth graders presented their findings, from the everyday duties of which paper towels absorb the most liquid, to the less useful in common situations, but no less important, launching a golf ball as far as possible with a home-made catapult, to the alternative energy of homemade wind turbines, to the kind-of-gross project of finding out how long it takes a Big Mac to rot into a festering pile.
     But it’s all in the name of scientific inquiry, said teacher, Hailey Tennesen. And she’s pretty pleased with what she saw.
     “I think it was very innovative what some of the sixth graders came up with,”      Tennesen said. “They would come up with a question that they wanted to test, like one of the boys, an overall top winner, wanted to test if cell phones affect your reaction time and motor skills, and I was thinking, ‘How are you going to test that without getting in an accident?’ He had the whole thing set up. It was just innovative thinking, and for 11 and 12-year-olds, that’s pretty amazing.”
     After deliberation by a panel of judges, who chose to remain anonymous, the choices were in. Four winners in each category, plus a top winner in each category, followed by the best entry over all.
     The winner of best over-all, Sierra Randall, for her splashy, starburst-covered display that somehow managed to look more like an advertisement for rotting bread, meat and other foods than a scientific experiment.
     After working for twelve days on keeping rotting foods in the family kitchen, she did face a few problems.
     “When I did it,” Randall said, “the meat was probably the worst smell. We covered it up with plastic, but then it kept on stinking, so my family members started complaining about it, so then we had to throw it away. After the project was finished, I wanted to re-do it to see how long the meat really took to mold, so I got some more meat and put it in a jar, then we did it all over again, but then we put a lid on so it wouldn’t stink so bad.”
     But rotting food aside, there was a purpose. The sixth grade science fair is a staple of the middle school. According to Tenneson, not only does it give kids an interest in science, whether they really want it or not,
     As far as the project goes, it is scored for the final grade, as well as state-wide achievement scores.
     “We score them on their hypothesis,” Tenneson said. Basically the steps of the scientific method, and if they met the state standards of the state write-up process.“
     But it’s not just about grades, it’s about learning, and sometimes being disgusted.
     “It was really, really gross,” Randall said, “But it was a really fun experiment.”