Innisfail High School students Ben Jud and Kirk Rieberger are in Quebec this week to compete in the 2016 Canada Wide Science Fair (CWSF).
The national competition takes place in Montreal May 15 to 20.
The two Grade 9 students were chosen to enter their science fair project at the national level after they won a gold medal, finishing second overall in their category at the regional science fair in Red Deer earlier this spring (March).
Their project researched the impacts of irregular sleep patterns.
“We called it human sleep patterns. We had four subjects sleep a regular sleep pattern of eight straight hours of sleep,” said Rieberger. “Then we took baseline scores, memory reaction time, happiness and typing speed.”
They then ran a modified sleep pattern of four hours of sleep, followed by two hours awake in the middle of the night and followed by another four hours of sleep.
“We did the tests again and compared the data between the regular sleep pattern and the modified pattern,” said Rieberger. “We had two mental and two physical (elements) as part of the project.”
Science fair partner Jud pointed to the interesting results from their project.
“The modified sleep patterns benefited our test subjects more than sleeping eight straight hours,” added Rieberger, noting test subjects were all male Grade 9 students. “It was the same amount of sleep, a total of eight hours, but it was broken up into two blocks.”
The staff at Innisfail High School was pleased with Jud and Rieberger's efforts.
“We are very, very proud of them,” said science teacher Peggy Freeman. “They are two very well deserving students and an excellent representation for Innisfail High School, and to represent us at nationals in Montreal.”
The weeklong event will include a couple of days of tours, judging day, some free time and one day for public viewing, noted Rieberger.
Both Jud and Rieberger are thrilled to have the opportunity to attend and compete at the national event this month, but are not raising their expectations too high, noted Jud.
“It'll definitely be exciting to be there, but we also don't want to put our expectations too high,” said Jud. “There's many good projects from around the country there. We want to do our best but not be disappointed if we don't do amazing.”
While in Montreal they both hope to experience the French culture, meet fellow students competing in the 2016 Canada Wide Science Fair and learn from the unique opportunity.
“We really hope that we can gain some experience interacting with other students from different parts of our country and see the different parts of science that are all uniting there,” Jud concluded. [email protected]
Peggy Freeman
"They are two very well deserving students and an excellent representation for Innisfail High School, and to represent us at nationals in Montreal."
