OSU hosts annual science fair, encourages creativity and passion in students

Mar. 11—Students from across Oklahoma gathered to share their creativity and passion for science last weekend.

Oklahoma State University hosted the Oklahoma State Science and Engineering Fair Friday and Saturday at the Wes Watkins Center, and 169 students from sixth- through 12th-grade competed from 41 schools across the state.

For more than 40 years, OSSEF was held at East Central University in Ada. About six years ago, the event moved to the OSU-Stillwater campus, where it has continued to grow and attract more interest.

Fair Co-Director Rachael Eaton, College of Arts and Sciences program manager for student research, said she was happy with the turnout.

"You'll see a range of students who have a lot of support from their teachers or maybe a mentor who's a professional in that field, all the way down to somebody who might have decided on their own in their home with just their parent to do a project," Eaton said.

Students can choose to compete in one of 10 categories in two divisions — Division I is ninth-12th grades and Division II is sixth-eighth grades.

The categories include all the major STEM categories, as well as the behavioral and social sciences.

OSU administrators, college deans, faculty, staff and students are involved with the fair, including Honors college students who earn college credit for helping to prepare for and serve as volunteers. Additionally, dozens of faculty, postdoctoral and graduate students served as judges.

The projects presented included Morrison High School ninth-grader Landon Riley, 14, who entered his behavioral and social sciences project, "Covid's Impact on Agricultural Prices."

Riley gathered data from five products — cattle, hogs, bananas, strawberries and wheat — and split them into time ranges, pre-Covid and post-Covid prices. Cattle and hog prices were Oklahoma-based products, but he used national price ranges for the other products.

After juggling numbers and finding the "t-statistic" (used in a hypothesis test), he came up with his hypothesis.

"We did all the number crunching and found that without inflation, all the prices never really got affected as much," Riley said. "Wheat was the only one that really went up."

Riley's father is an agricultural economist, so Riley was inspired to focus on this particular theme for his science project. His grandparents also raise cattle and grow corn and soybeans.

Riley was involved in OSSEF at regionals last year as a Stillwater student, then transferred to the Morrison district. This was his first time competing at a state science fair.

"(My favorite part) was learning to do all this because this is my first time," Riley said. "My dad helped me with it."

Morrison High School ninth-grader Jaxon Sanders, 15, is an avid snowboarder. This was his third year to be involved in the science fair.

Sanders took second place in the Morrison district and then second place at regionals, making it to State.

He often goes to Purgatory Resort in Durango, Colorado to snowboard and wanted to test his theory if ski wax affects the friction when the snowboard glides through the snow.

For his physics and astronomy project, he performed three trials with a ski sliding down a board as it was raised and found that the wax reduced the friction by 66.6%, with an elevation difference of one foot.

"I really didn't think it would make a whole lot of difference with the wax, but I mean, the fact that it did just kind of proved me wrong," Sanders said. "... In about a week or so for spring break, I'll be going up to (Purgatory Resort), so I could maybe look further into this."

Stillwater High School 10th-grader Alex Kidangathazhe, 15, won first in the senior division for the microbiology category with his project "Enhancing the Efficacy of Last-Resort Antibiotics: Developing Synergistic Antibiotic Flavonoid Combinations."

"As we're all aware, antibiotics are the most common and effective treatment for bacteria infections," Kidangathazhe said. "However, due to a variety of reasons — primarily over prescription — antibiotics are becoming less and less effective."

Kidangathazhe said this is due to something known as antimicrobial resistance and often affects people in communities who can't afford the expensive alternative treatments currently on the market.

In his experiment he used flavonoids — plant-based compounds known for their antioxidant capabilities — and their derivatives, phenolic acids, along with existing antibiotics to increase their lifespan, reduce the rate of resistance being developed and increase their efficacy overall.

Kidangathazhe tested his theory on two bacteria and found that by using flavonoids with antibiotics, there was a 32-fold reduction in the dosage of antibiotics, in addition to causing less harm to the patient's gut microbiome.

"In the future, I'd really like to confirm the mechanism of action, especially of the antibiotics, and I'd also like to get my bioreactor data and use a supercomputing cluster to analyze that, because once we have that data, I can assess how it affects the gut microbiome as a whole."

He said one of the biggest problems with giving large doses of antibiotics is that it kills the entire gut microbiome, exposing patients later to deadly infections.

"Really far in the future, I'd like to try and cultivate a community of these phenolic degrading bacteria in a mouse gut or even a human gut, and see if that would be able to — combined with a special diet — provide almost a secondary immune system of phenolic acids," Kidangathazhe said.

He said he started planning for the project last summer, but moving to Stillwater from Brookings, South Dakota meant he had to pause preparations.

His first science project reveal the global state of antimicrobial resistance, and the data alarmed him.

"I wanted to find alternative methods," Kidangathazhe said. "... When you have a flu and you go to the doctor's office and they prescribe you an antibiotic, nine cases out of 10, you'd never need the antibiotic in the first place. Studies show that they only decrease the days of symptoms being present by one or two. Would you rather be able to take that antibiotic when you really need it, or when you feel like a little unhappy?"

Eaton, who has a PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology and behavior, said the OSSEF Steering Team is always looking for ways to make the fair better, easier and more accessible for students and teachers.

She hopes more local students to take advantage of the fair, which she said is "a wide-open opportunity." She said she sees energy and health as areas that need a stronger focus in the future.

Eaton said data shows that undergraduate students who are involved in research often stay in their majors longer and graduate, building critical skills and confidence that help them on their path to career readiness.

She doesn't see why that shouldn't start with a younger population of students.

"(It's) helping students see that it's not just the science project for the sake of the science project, but it can unlock something that we don't understand or it can solve a problem that we haven't been able to solve," Eaton said.

In past years, OSU colleges and OSU Agriculture Research, along with the Bill and Billie Buckles Foundation, have helped fund the OSSEF.

"We'd love to be able to grow the fair and get more folks involved," Eaton said. "I'm a big believer in the role of research and student development ... helping them clarify their own interests."