POLOKWANE – Stanford Lake College (SLC) learners Matthew Lunt, Elané Maritz and Christian Schmidt participated in the national Tritech science expo in Tzaneen on Friday August 22.
Following the regional round, the learners were given suggestions from the judges on how to improve their projects and were also expected to develop their ideas and communicate their findings to specific communities. All three learners were placed in the top three in their respective categories.
Christian Schmidt won third place in the agricultural category with his project: Different Colours of Shading nets Affect Plant Growth.
He also took his idea to Matthew Venter, the environmental officer at SLC, in the hope that his results will help with decisions about the building of the greenhouse on campus.
Matthew Lunt won second place in the maths, science and technology category with his project: Talk, The Magic Dragon.
He found that using a specific programme enables people to dictate work and translate it into text quickly and with fewer mistakes than typing.
He has communicated his results to numerous people including teachers in KwaZulu Natal and a lecturer from the University of Oxford in the UK.
Elané Maritz finished in first place in the engineering category. In her project, Don’t Wanna Have Cold Feet, she researched the best material to use in order to reduce heat loss in water and used this principle to design socks.
She informed learners at in the boarding house of her findings and asked them to trial her new invention of socks, the Foilocks, which combined two layers of socks with a foil layer for insulation.
