from Student Honored at Local Science Fair cites Adafruit Tutorials as Helpful Resource #makereducation by Kelly

For the second year in a row, 8th Grader Sophia Buckwalter was named junior high champion of her county science fair. Sophia reached out to Adafruit to thank us for our tutorials!

Sophia writes:



“I wanted to follow up with how I did at my local County Science Fair in Lancaster, PA. I was awarded Junior Champion, as a middle school student that is the highest award one can receive. I was also nominated for the Junior National Science Fair (Broadcom)…I really want to extend my gratitude for your tutorials (especially Tony DiCola’s) again, because I would not have been able to construct my STEM project and make it this far with out it.”

Sophia’s project focused on measuring guitar notes, via lancasteronline:



This year, Buckwalter’s project focused on the tone of notes played by a guitar, while last year she looked at how long a guitar note was sustained.

The daughter of Kathy and Greg Buckwalter, of Manheim, Buckwalter used two methods to test the tone of different woods used in making guitars. For her project, she obtained 10 samples of exotic woods, including Sitka spruce and ovangkol, from Martin Guitar in Nazareth, Northampton County.

She found that both methods worked to predict the tone of notes but one method, spectrogram analysis, revealed more about the piece of wood used in the guitar.

Buckwalter plays both acoustic and electric guitar, and likes classic rock. She is partial to Les Paul, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.



For her next year’s project, she said she might actually try to make a guitar herself.



Read more.

Each Tuesday is EducationTuesday here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts about educators and all things STEM. Adafruit supports our educators and loves to spread the good word about educational STEM innovations!