Family, Harmony church host science project fair
HARMONY — While some schools have science fairs, a local home schooling family hosts an annual project fair open to home-schooled children in the area. This year's fair included projects like voice-activated robots, homemade hoverboards and butterfly raising.
The Homeschool Project Fair was hosted at the Grace Church of Harmony on Thursday, displaying projects from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade for students who are both home-schooled and cyberschooled, according to Monika Landis of Harmony. Landis's two daughters, Abi, 13, and Amber, 10, are both cyberschooled with Connections Academy.
For those students who do not attend public schools, the project fair lets them show off their work, which is something that these nontraditional students don't often get to do.
“This is an opportunity to celebrate their work, have an audience and get a lot of feedback,” Landis said. The fair also gives parents of home-schooled or cyberschooled students a chance to see what other students are learning, she said.
It also gives students a chance to share topics that they are passionate about, since the project can be on any topic of the student's choice, Landis said.
For 8-year-old Sarah Bupp of Jackson Township, the fair gave her an opportunity to speak out about protecting the habitat of the monarch butterfly.
Dressed in a graphic T-shirt adorned with a butterfly, Sarah shared the story of how she raised three sets of monarch butterflies in her own backyard, then let them go.
Monarch butterflies have been dying out dramatically, partially because they only lay eggs on milkweed plants, Sarah said.
“They're decreasing because of housing developments and farms and the stuff they spray to kill bugs,” she said, stressing that pesticides and other farm sprays can kill butterflies and the plants they need to survive.
Sarah loves animals of all kinds, already a vegetarian, according to her mother, Deb Alley Bupp. When the family recently acquired more property, sprinkled with milkweed, Sarah made sure those plants stayed. “She won't let us mow any milkweed down,” Bupp said.
Sarah ended her presentation by handing out packets of orange milkweed seeds, a variety of milkweed native to Pennsylvania, and encouraging people to grow milkweed to help monarch butterfly populations rebound.For 12-year-old Kyla Garrison, the project fair allowed her to be creative and hands-on, building her own hovercraft that she demonstrated by riding it at the event.The hovercraft was built out of plywood, a plastic sheet and a leaf blower and took about a week to build.“I'm just really glad that it worked,” Kyla said. “I thought it would be really cool and interesting if it worked. People would be surprised by it.”Kyla was able to ride the hovercraft with the assistance of her sister, Maeghan, 14. Both girls are home-schooled in the Mount Lebanon area, Kyla said.Another project included a new type of hard body armor for armed forces, using the natural pattern of an armadillo's shell to inspire the vest.Nathanael McGuire, 17, of Pittsburgh, designed the body armor by using ceramic tiles in a hexagon shape instead of the sheet of tile used in current designs, he said.The vest works with layers of ceramic tiles in front of other materials like titanium and Kevlar, which make up a portion of the vest Nathanael called the composite layer.“A bullet hits (the armor), the bullet shatters and the ceramic shatters, but the composite absorbs the shock,” he said.But by using hexagon tiles, Nathanael can limit how far the ceramic shatters. On the sheets, the ceramic can shatter substantially, but with small tiles, only a small portion of the ceramic shatters, he said.In all of Nathanael's research, he did not find hexagon-shaped models or smaller tiles used, he said.However, because the ceramic shatters, close shots in the same area can pose a threat since the vest becomes weakened, but that problem is not at all specific to Nathanael's design and is something the industry recognized as a problem across the board.“That's a problem for any body armor,” Nathanael said.When tested against an AK-47 and military-style AR-10 and AR-15 rifles, the vest held up well, except when shots were too close together, but Nathanael only built one model.He admits that his idea needs some work, but he's still happy with how successful his homemade body armor worked, he said.Nathanael does not have immediate plans to develop this armor but said he might revisit the idea again someday, after he attends the University of Pittsburgh for some form of engineering.The project fair had roughly 60 people in attendance, with 20 student projects, half of which were from Butler County students, Landis said.The event draws a crowd from eastern Ohio and Allegheny County since many areas do not host homeschool or cyberschool events.“Some of the families that came to our event came because they don't have something like this,” Landis said.This is the event's fourth year, Landis said, since it replaces a previous project fair that was hosted in Grove City.
