by Julie Gowel ·
Friday, March 14, 2025
The Bromfield Science Fair impressed judges and spectators with innovative student project presentations ranging from engineering feats to environmental initiatives on Friday, March 7, in the Bromfield School cafeteria.
Science fair organizer and chemistry teacher Kristen Vanderveen heads to the science fair after briefing the event judges. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)
Dr. Kristen Vanderveen, Bromfield chemistry teacher and science fair organizer, estimated this to be the 57th year the school has put on the event. She spent months soliciting judges, building rubrics (a set of criteria used for judging), and planning the logistics for the 51 student project submissions.
“This is my fourth year running the science fair,” said Vanderveen. “The best part is today, watching it happen. I can’t imagine Bromfield not doing it; it’s a long-standing tradition that we feel really enhances our program.”
The nerves of the students were palpable, as was the excitement of the judges. Above the din of the crowd, DIY speakers pounded out a deep bass. The swishing of a rowing machine that generated electricity made it difficult to hear the difference in sound featured in a neighboring project, which used “silencing” technology to muffle the click-clack of typing. The gentle rush of air generated from a fan with no blades played tricks on the mind with its disruptive technology.
Many entries had real-world applications, from improving water quality awareness to generating renewable energy. The exhibits stemmed from curiosity to environmental concerns to personal experiences. What stood out most was the enthusiasm with which students delivered their presentations.
Emma Nguyen talks with Bromfield teacher Kathleen Doherty about CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats), a genetic engineering technique that modifies the DNA of living organisms.
“The topics are so creative and very specific,” said Jenny Temps, who was judging for her eighth year in a row. “[The students] want to delve into something that has, for some reason, sparked an interest in them, and they come up with fabulous ideas. And sometimes those ideas don’t work.” Temps was impressed with the resiliency shown by students in the face of obstacles. “They run into a problem, they couldn’t get the materials, or some other complication, and so they abandon ship, pivot, and do something different. It is such a learning process and that’s why I love it.”
Camille Bradley poses with a dose of Narcan as she explains her project on how Narcan can reverse an opioid overdose.
The Bromfield faculty and staff, as well as many community organizations, participate in the yearly science fair. The highest achievement is a blue rosette, presented by Bromfield to the top projects at the high school and middle school levels. Volunteer judges recruited by the school are given a section of the fair that does not conflict with any familial relations, if applicable.
Additionally, many community organizations participate in the fair, sending representatives to judge projects and present their own awards. Some offer prizes to their chosen winners. For example, the Harvard Lions Club awarded $25 cash to each of its top three choices for best projects. The Harvard Schools Parent Teacher Organization (PTO) gave six certificates of recognition along with gift cards to the General Store. Even the Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club got in on the action, awarding tours of the MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford to its winners.
The culmination of months of research, experiments, and organizing concluded with blue rosettes awarded to middle-schoolers Grace McWaters and Amelia Kennedy (grade 8) for their project titled “How Pollutants Affect Bioluminescent Bacteria” and to junior Anna Selig for her research on “Coding a Large Language Learning Model without Pre-written API.”
Kennedy and McWaters not only received the blue rosette for middle school submissions, their project won first place for the grade 8 experiments. And they were recognized by the Bare Hill Pond Watershed Management Committee for their work in discovering that bioluminescence could be used as a natural, effective pollution detector. Bioluminescence is the production of light by living organisms. The girls studied glowing bacteria by introducing pollutants to test tubes containing bioluminescence. In almost every test, pollutants such as bug spray, oil, and glass caused light production to significantly decrease, with some completely extinguishing all of the light. The pond committee provided the girls with gift certificates to the West Side Creamery in Hudson.
Juniors Eleanor Daly and Ellie Pulido won over the Nashoba Valley Amateur Radio Club in their attempt to harness the energy created when training on a rowing machine to generate electricity.
“We’re varsity rowers here at Bromfield,” said Daly. “We are currently in the middle of our winter training season, so we spend a lot of time on these rowing machines. It made us really start thinking about useful ways that we could potentially use the energy that we were producing through our own sweat and work.”
Daly and Pulido sourced a second-hand rowing machine, also known as an erg, as well as a used laundry machine motor and alternator to build their design. “The thing that I enjoyed most was seeing it come together, getting on the erg and taking strokes with the machine for the first time and seeing my voltage show up was really amazing,” said Pulido. “Also, seeing how much energy is actually required to power up a rechargeable battery really just puts things into perspective.”
Ellie Pulido demonstrates as Eleanor Daly explains their project “Using a rowing machine to power a household generator.” From left are Pulido, judges Doug Williams and Trevor Smedley, and Daly..
Sophomores Bowen Clarke and Evan Gill decided to perform their own water quality test on the fountains and sinks in the Bromfield School. Their efforts scored them second place in the Bromfield School Grade 10 Biology and Chemistry Experiment category.
“I’ve heard countless complaints about the school’s water,” said Clarke. “It tastes so bad that people avoid getting water from fountains. I think that students need to know what they’re drinking every day.”
Clarke and Gill learned that Bromfield bathroom sinks contained the worst quality water while the fountains in the cafeteria and outside the gym had the best, though even those sources contained concerning amounts of mercury and high alkalinity and pH levels.
“It’s really cool that we learned so much about water quality,” said Gill. “We both worked as lifeguards last summer. We were told to put chemicals in the water and test it, but we didn’t really know what any of the values meant. Now we do.”
“What’s in the water?” Evan Gill (left) and Bowen Clarke tackle the hidden dangers that can lurk in the school’s driinking water.
Freshmen Graham Bala, Alex Soor, and Cole Dandridge, impressed the Lions Club with their homemade speakers. Fashioned from buckets, the speakers were wired to an audio receiver which was plugged into a smartphone in order to play music from an app.
“It was a lot harder than we thought, but we definitely learned a lot about how it works,” said Bala. “The voice coils were challenging because we had to take really thin copper wire and wind it up a lot of times and repeat it for each speaker.”
“We went to Savers for some of our supplies and the hardware store for the buckets,” said Dandridge. “The rest I just had in my barn.”
“Once we got all it set up, it was really fun to hear them all playing in sync,” said Soor. “They get really loud. We wouldn’t be able to play them at full volume.” He said the cafeteria wasn’t a good environment to test the limits of the noise.
Graham Bala (left) and Cole Dandridge along with Alex Soor (not visible) stand behind their giant homemade speakers made with buckets and copper wire.
Juniors Lainey Irwin and Hanna Wicks assessed how plastic pollution affects small marine organisms, using brine shrimp, otherwise known as sea monkeys. The pair found that plastic waste led to death for the creatures due to inadequate access to nutrients.
“My dad worked for a plastics company for a lot of my childhood,” said Irwin. “So it was definitely conflicting interests knowing that plastic is such a benefit to our economy, but it also has detrimental impacts on our world as a whole.”
“It took multiple trials to figure this out, seven I think,” said Wicks. “[The brine shrimp] were not living longer than a week. The hardest part was figuring out the right amount of [water conditioner] to put in, the right type of food to feed, the exact temperature … that was before we could even start our research.”
Irwin and Wicks received recognition from the Harvard PTO for their project.
Vasilis Psathas turns on an ionic air mover as part of the project “Ionic Thruster Science” that he built with Fin Piekos (not shown). The technology is used in fans, hair dryers, and even satellites.
Vasilis Psathas and Fin Piekos, both seniors, teamed up to build a battery-powered thruster that generates moving air, like that produced by a fan. They used different metals and a battery to engineer the technology used in the futuristic-looking bladeless fans Dyson introduced to the market in 2009.
“We thought we would take a relatively new technology and try to see if we can replicate it,” said Piekos. “During our original design, we used steel screws, aluminum cans, and a smaller battery, and it could barely produce a thrust. So we decided to use more conductive metals: copper pipes and zinc-plated screws. Then, we stepped up the power to a 12-volt battery, and it became something like 10 times more powerful.”
Unsurprisingly, Piekos and Psathas intend to pursue engineering upon graduation.
— AWARDS —