Young boffins work grey cells and flames

School students from across the country came up with innovative solutions and entertaining displays at a science exhibition

BENGALURU: When aspiring, young scientists were invited to be part of “The Amateur Scientist”, organised by the PES University, they came in hordes. Around 5,000 students from nearly 200 schools across the country sent in their applications.

Students of classes VIII to XII played soccer with robots, went on tech-treasure hunts, drew molecular murals, and participated in code wars and quizzes.

Science projects, around twenty of them, were the crowd puller.

Ruben’s Tube, designed by Kavya Aras, Mohamed Raiyan and Rashwin of Sadvidya Semi Residential PU College, had fire dancing to a musical tune.

The flames oscillated, upwards and downwards, from the holes drilled onto a 6-foot-long cylindrical tube. One end of the tube was connected to an LPG cylinder and the other end to a speaker. The sound waves emitted by the speaker vary the pressure in the tube and move the fumes (flames). 

It was a breathtaking display of a musical fountain, but made of fire. This Tube moves with the rhythm of the song, waves register different audio frequencies. This Tube is the adaptation of a method used in electrocardiography.

Help for the Blind

Siddarth Karki, a student of Sadvidya Semi Residential PU College, had designed a headband (helmet) and had named it Metior Oculorum or False Eyes. This is to help the  visually impaired navigate and read without distraction from their ambient environment.  This is a version refined after field tests. “I spent my time testing my project with visually impaired students of the Sri Ramana Maharishi Academy. I made changes based on their feedback,” said Siddarth. He had earlier designed spectacles that served the same purpose, but  that one was clunky.  This headband has an ultrasonic sensor connected to an Arduino board, which is a prototyping platform used to create interactive electronic objects. The band does not cover or even reach the ears, but alerts the blind by sending an audio signal, as vibrations, through bone conduction. The receivers, placed at the temples, carry vibrations and the inner ear registers them as sound. The sensors are placed at different angles to detect obstacles and emit beeps of different frequencies to indicate the height of the obstacle. This technology has been employed for the deaf. Flying machines and drones were seen doing sorties at the Aero Show, but the most entertaining was Robot Soccer -  robots playing soccer on a miniature ground.  Rishab Rao, of Canara High School, Manglore, won this game of soccer.

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