STEM students prepare for Virginia Junior Academy of Science

Senior+Yogesh+Aradhey+works+on+his+groups+drone

Sam Heie

Senior Yogesh Aradhey works on his group’s drone

Sam Heie, Editor-in-Chief

Virginia Junior Academy of Science (VJAS) is a state-wide tournament designed to promote scientific creativity and research within high schools. It is an annual competition held at Virginia colleges. It’s rewards consist of scholarships and other substantial prizes. Students submit papers about their research and then if selected, they present their final product to a panel of judges.

Projects from HHS are supervised by STEM teacher Myron Blosser.

“It’s an organization that allows researchers to present research and that’s how people hear about the new data being gathered. VJAS is open to high school students who want to share their ideas with the scientific world,” Blosser said.

Projects can be submitted by groups or by individuals. There are 17 different categories for submission that range from engineering to botany and zoology. The process of submission begins months before the actual tournament.

“In the middle of February, we submit the papers and they go to the judges. The judges read through the papers and score them. If you do well on them and get a good score, then you are invited to come and present at the actual tournament,” Blosser said.

Students can submit any topic they want, whether it be original or a repeat.

“We have a group of juniors that are simply redoing the same research they did last year to polish it up and make it better and that’s the way to do it. The first time you research, you don’t have enough time and you aren’t ready, so that’s why we are encouraging students to polish what they have already done,” Blosser said.

Junior Iliya Zudilin is one of the juniors reworking their project from last year. Zudilin is in a Biotechnology class, taught by Blosser. Their work falls under the psychology category.

“We’re just expanding on our project from last year which is about the effect of music on test taking. We’re trying to get a bigger sample size and more music to make it more accurate [than last year],” Zudilin said.

Zudilin and his group of juniors Cora Metzler-Sawin, Garrett Cash and Jenai Macarthur used techno, country, rock and classical music on test takers. Their results from last year didn’t quite live up to expectations.

“Test takers did better when listening to rock and the worst listening to classical which is the opposite of what we thought would happen. We’re just going to do it again to see if that stays the same,” Zudilin said.

The group gained inspiration for their project from the AP Psychology class they took last year. They were invited to Mary Washington to present their projects, but didn’t win any awards.

Another group participating in the project-making are seniors Tyler Rodriguez, Yogesh Aradhey and Jake Urbanski. Their project is categorized as an engineering submission.

“We decided we wanted to build a drone. We kind of just wanted to build it for the actual drone, but the VJAS project was an add on. We got the frame, the propellers, the motors, the controllers and the computers and put it all together and then we use a flight software called Mission Planner to make it fly,” Rodriguez said.

The drone took nine weeks to build to the point where it was able to fly, but their mission doesn’t stop there.

“The long term goal is to program it to do collision avoidance with sonar sensors. So we’ll put a little sonar matrix on the bottom and build legs so there is space for that,” Rodriguez said.

In the end, Rodriguez hopes that it would be able to automatically avoid buildings and objects being thrown at it, but the group still has a far way to go.

“Once we finish the base functions of the drone, we are going to have to do some programming and some coding in order to get object avoidance. It’s going to be a lot of work, but it will be worth it,” Rodriguez said.

The group is working with JMU Engineering professors to fix and adjust the drone to fit their needs and VJAS requirements. The group is currently one of 45 that HHS will submit to the tournament.

“I’ve been teaching a long time and it’s really easy for schools to teach science,” Blosser said. “Seldom do I see students actually do science. That’s the kind of the idea behind VJAS; it allows students to not only learn about science, but it also encourages them to do science and that’s really cool.”