Wiregrass State finalists: 11 moving on

Although only two Wiregrass students are moving on to the international level, 11 students are moving forward to the State competition; this is nearly one-third of the 30 students who competed in Regionals. The State Fair will be held April 4-6 in Lakeland, Florida with more than 900 students competing. Carly Bronson, Kate Niehoff, Dikembai Woodfill, Ryan Harris, Syd Norris, Andrew Lambert, Gavin Sawall, Gianna Ginesin, Christian Rios, and of course Meghna Manjith, as well as Caroline McHale, will be moving on to Florida’s 68th State Science and Engineering Fair.

Each of these students put hours upon hours of hard work, dedication, and passion into their projects. The students formed a connection with each other through this long and tedious process and worked together often.

“All the science fair kids help each other whether it’s designing our boards or discussing the logical progression of our projects,” senior and state finalist Gianna Ginesin stated.

The regional competition had many students anxiously anticipating the outcome of their hard work.

“The atmosphere was honestly an entire experience because you could feel the nervousness from the students and the excitement from the judges to learn about what you did,” Syd Norris said. 

Many of the students had specific motivations behind their research projects, whether it was to improve a problem in the world or to broaden research in a specific field. Similarly to the rest of his classmates, Sawall took a real-world problem that he wanted solved and did something about it. Sawall’s goal was to create something that would help people in compromised situations, similar to something his family experienced at home. 

“I wanted to optimize the response time of a motion detection system I created to monitor hospital patient movements,” Sawall detailed, after his father struggled with movement at home post-treatment for a leg injury. “I wanted to design a system that would ease the pressure on my mother and potentially save my father’s life.” 

Best of luck to everyone competing in the state competition to all our Wiregrass competitions.