Mad Science? No, M-D Science!

Bill Nye the Science Guy doesn’t have anything on the little scientists of Wilton’s Miller-Driscoll School.

Judging by the array of creative Science Fair projects on display at Wednesday night’s school program, the community has a crop of budding scientists learning all about how to design scientific experiments to test and prove their theories.

Jane Giresi, the Science Instructional Leader at Miller-Driscoll, explained that students in all grades were encouraged to design a project around a question they wanted an answer to, likely something simple enough about the local flora and fauna or about the foods kids like to eat. They were taught how to create a hypothesis around their question and then to figure out how to test it.

But the valuable lesson for the kids, according to Giresi? Showing their work to their friends and family during the three science fair evenings, April 12-14.

“They do real inquiry, but then they get to share it with other people. And I think that’s such an important part of inquiry. It’s not just doing the work, it’s being able to share it with other people,” she said.

All of the students were eager to talk about their projects and what they learned, and most revealed that they thought science was fun.

Matthew Ferrante found inspiration from the different colored lights in his kitchen to ask, “Does Light Go Through Everything?” He said he liked the precise record-keeping required of a scientist. “The best part about doing this was the graphs.”

Avery Newcomer studied different kinds of seashells, inspired by the shell collecting she’s done during various Florida trips over the past three years. She learned that there are 40,000 different kinds of shells that can be divided into two main types. Her interactive displayed let visitors sort shells from her vast shell collection into the two groupings.

Zarius Eusebe tested "What Liquid Freezes Faster?" by comparing how quickly water freezes when it is mixed with sugar, with salt or with nothing at all. He was confident about science being fun, “because you get to play around and experiment.”

The brother and sister team of Abbe and Sam Ricketts said they had so much fun they now considered themselves “science people, and we really like math too.” Their experiment examining whether different kinds of citrus fruits have different numbers of seeds helped them learn more than one useful fact: “Getting the juice on a cut really stings,” according to Sam, who said his sister was the guinea pig for that part of the project.

Catie Baer’s question—“How do you stop an apple from turning brown?”—came from her desire to solve her own problem: she doesn’t like to eat brown apples. “I thought you could stop it with cold water, but you can’t. But now I know what to do!”