Olds High School students Tim Carlielle and Collin Fair came back from P.E.I. last week with a silver medal and a bronze medal, respectively.
They won the medals at the 2012 National Science Fair, which was held in Charlottetown.
This was their sixth consecutive participation at the National Science Fair, and also their last.
“It's the end of an era I guess for us. It was sad but it was also a really good science fair to go off on,” said Carlielle.
Both Carlielle and Fair have been participating in science fairs since Grade 1. During their science fair careers, Carlielle won four medals and six awards, as well as a few special awards, while Fair won five medals and some special awards.
This also gave them the opportunity to travel across Canada, visiting Nova Scotia, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Peterborough, Toronto, and P.E.I.
This year, Carlielle got his silver medal for developing a personal snow transportation system.
“It's basically like a snowmobile, a very small version, with a track and a motor that goes in front of you,” he said.
“You wear downhill skis and it has a handlebar. You hold on to it and it pulls you.”
Carlielle noted that the system could be used for recreation, but also for farming, research, or search and rescue.
Meanwhile, Fair designed a software program to help people with physical disabilities type text without a keyboard.
“Instead, they can use a joystick, or something that tracks the position of their eyes, anything like that,” he said.
Their projects reflected their interests, with Carlielle hoping to attend engineering school after taking a gap year, and Fair planning on attending the University of Waterloo to study software engineering.
“At the science fair, there are PhDs and all the experienced people who judge your project. They talk about how this relates to their own opinions and what they think of your work,” said Fair.
“You learn a lot from it and you can get good experience that I hope will help me in whatever job I end up doing.”
Carlielle and Fair say they already plan to volunteer at next year's National Science Fair, which will be held in Lethbridge.
“That will be cool because we will get to see the fair from a different angle,” said Carlielle.
