SALT LAKE CITY -- Several weeks from now, March 26- 29, will be a demanding time for 900 junior high school and high school students from across Central Utah, who have been selected to compete in the prestigious Central Utah Science & Engineering Fair at BYU.

Students were chosen from more 100,000 eligible project submissions across Central Utah territories including Alpine, Jordan, Nebo, Provo, Wasatch and private and charter schools.

David van Dijk, lead science instructor for Pleasant Grove High School and moderator for the Alpine School District Science Fair held at Pleasant Grove High School for the past nine years, said that only 75 out of more than 200 project submissions at the district level were selected to receive a medal, certificate of recognition and the opportunity to go on to compete at the regional level.

Winter Wester and Mina Park, both Willow Creek Middle School 9th graders in Lehi, Utah, were selected as a group project to move on to Central Utah Science & Engineering Fair, after winning over several other high caliber projects from competing 9th-12th graders.

Their project, The Impact in Spatial Recognition Between Virtual and Physical Environmental Dimensions, competed for the category of Behavioral Science, and was lauded by judges at the district level for their ingenuity in devising a research study around a problem that had not been previously evaluated at the academic scholarly level.

More particularly, their research study showed the effects of two dimensional top-down maps when used in a three- dimensional virtual environment by a sample population of 30 individuals who either had experience playing video games and/or board games, or had no experience with gaming.

The girls developed their own custom virtual 3D maze that users could navigate while being timed and tracked. Their sample population was selected from a group of top-tiered male and female technologists and sales/marketing/accounting executives for Deseret Digital Media, the technology group responsible for operating KSL.com and DeseretNews.com, among other high profile web sites.

While celebrating their hard-won victory over double scoops of ice cream from JCWs near Thanksgiving Point, Winter and Mina described how their science fair project enabled them to interact with professionals in an active workplace with whom they would otherwise never have the opportunity.

Winter said she and Mina were scared and nervous to test so many adults. However, after conducting the first couple of tests, they said they realized how enjoyable a process it was to perform scientific testing and discover new findings from the data.

Eric Bright

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Utah students put KSL technologists to the test