Local Student Wins at Science Fair
by
Johnny C. Jones

 Bryan Jones, a freshman at Iron County C-4 School, won top honors in the Computer Science Division of the South Central Missouri Science and Engineering Fair held at UMR on March 25, 1988.

 Students in grades 9-12 from a fifteen-county area entered 133 projects in thirteen divisions.  Computer Science had seven other entries competing against Bryan's.  The second place winner in his division was a senior from Potosi.

 Bryan's project, "Shape Recognition Using Computer Classification," used a digitizer bitpad.  The bitpad was to the computer like a pencil and paper; it sent electronic signals telling where the wand touched the pad.  Bryan programmed the computer to recognize simple shapes drawn by the user and tell the user what shape had been drawn, from triangles to septagons. The program could recognize up to 65,000 sides, but Bryan programmed it to print only up to seven.

 Bryan defined lines using least squares, a mathematics technique.  To figure out whether the line had ended and turned into another line, he used standard deviations and a prediction about where the first line should go.

 The most difficult part of the project was figuring out what was going on between the computer and the bitpad, and defining whether a line stopped and another line began. To learn what was going on, he wrote an analysis program, four pages long, that would run while the line was being drawn on screen.  He also wrote a bitpad interface, a user interface, setup routines, a controller for synchronization, and a routine to print out the shape onscreen.

 The analysis routine contained a function to remove extraneous coordinates, one that summed a series of numbers, one that found the least squares of a set of numbers, one that found the standard deviation of a set of numbers, a controller for the analysis section, and a printout to tell what the computer was  doing.  In all there were eight pages of program done in C programming language.

 Bryan's project, as all projects in the fair, was judged on creativity, scientific thought or engineering application, thoroughness, and skill and clarity of presentation.

 A student from Potosi, sophomore Kevin Lowry, won the Grand Prize for his engineering project, "Hydrogen, a Study of Electrolysis of Water in order to Determine the Most Efficient Way to Store Energy from the Sun and Ocean Thermal Gradients."  Kevin won a trip to the International Science Fair in Knoxville and a four-year scholarship to UMR.

 First runner up was a microbiology project, "Evolution in Bacteria, the Effects of Two Antibiotics on E. Coli, a Two-Phase Study" by Wanda Jo Williams and Lori Dawn Wood of Mansfield High School.  These girls also won the right to enter the International Science Fair and a scholarship to UMR.

 The ten divisions of the fair not yet mentioned were biochemistry, botany, chemistry, earth science, environmental science, human behavior, mathematics, medicine and health, physics, and zoology.  Winners from each division were in competition for the Grand Prize.  The projects were so competitive that it took the twenty judges an hour and a half to determine the overall winner.  "I saw some super projects," Chip Jones commented.