Boulder High senior Rafael Hernandez Guerrero wanted to know if Boulder’s at-large City Council election format could have an impact on Latino representation. He gathered data on Colorado cities, including total population, Latino population and whether their councilmembers were elected at-large or by a single-member district.

Finding data on the ethnicity of the City Council members was more challenging, he said, so he resorted to looking at the last names of council members to come up with approximate numbers. Finally, he used a formula to determine if there was a statistically significant difference in Latino representation between the two methods — and found that single-member district elections did lead to more Latino representation.

He added that he’s still researching Boulder specifically, noting there may be complicating factors that could impact if a change would be beneficial here. But generally, he said, “at-large elections have a tendency to dilute the voting power of minorities.”“I’m really passionate about this,” he said.

His research was among 156 projects presented Monday at the annual Corden Pharma Colorado Regional Science Fair at the Boulder Valley Education Center. Corden Pharma partners with the Boulder Valley School District to sponsor the science fair.

Middle and high school students presented their original, independent projects to a team of about 100 judges, including local scientists and researchers. Many judges come back every year.

Paul Sperry, a retired scientist who previously served as the executive director of Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, has served as a judge at the fair for some 40 years.

“I like seeing creative ingenuity and connecting the dots in a way most traditional thinkers wouldn’t see,” he said. “You want to get them to do critical thinking. You want them to look at a problem and how it can be addressed in an efficient way that benefits society.”

Forty-four projects will move on to the Colorado Engineering and Science Fair in April in Fort Collins, while three regional projects will be selected to go directly to the International Science and Engineering Fair in May in California. Additional winners at the state level also move on to the international fair.

All Boulder Valley high schools participated, as did Boulder Country Day School, Flagstaff Academy, Peak to Peak Charter, Platt Middle, Sacred Heart of Jesus, Southern Hills Middle, St. John the Baptist, Summit Middle and a few homeschool students.

At Monday’s fair, middle school projects included an evaluation of sunscreens using a UV lamp and detector, using marshmallows and fruit to show the effect on body parts while in space, and building a climbing wheelchair that can navigate a few steps.

Madeleine Hahn, a sixth grader at Longmont’s Flagstaff Academy, decided to mix technology and social science by looking at whether AI is racist or sexist. She used three AI platforms to generate photos of traditionally male and female dominated professions and found two of the three overrepresented women in male dominated professions.

“It was surprising,” she said. “It was a very fun experience to share my results and findings with other people.”

Keira Klemmick, an eighth grader at Boulder’s Summit Middle, looked at how well biodegradable plastic forks and straws would degrade in Colorado’s climate. She broke them up and placed them in dirt in bins outside, them sifted out the pieces and measured the mass after a period of time. At the end, she said, she found little biodegradation.

She added that one of her challenges was that her cat got around the trellis she built to protect her experiment. Others were the possibility she lost pieces thanks to wind and a short time frame.

“As I researched, I got more interested in the topic,” she said. “I love research.”

On the high school side, many students competing at the regional fair are enrolled in Boulder Valley’s science research seminar class, while students in the engineering program at Lafayette’s Centaurus High School also entered projects.

Chloe Whiton, a senior at Lafayette’s Centaurus High, wanted to solve the problem of her family’s youngest dog eating the oldest dog’s medicated food. So she designed a prototype of a locking dog bowl, using a circuit board, a motor and an RFID reader that closes the bowl and makes a noise if a dog wearing the wrong tag gets too close to the bowl.

“It was really hard to 3D print the lid,” she said. “It was a lot of trial and error. It was an interesting process to design and troubleshoot it. I learned so much.”

Along with learning how to code, use a circuit board and 3D print a complex shape, she said, the project taught her that engineering isn’t her passion. Instead, she’s considering majoring in chemistry and food science.

“It helped me figure out what I actually like,” she said.

Alexander Zhang, a senior at Boulder’s Fairview High who is planning to attend Stanford in the fall, first competed in the fair as an eighth grader and has entered projects all four years of high school.

“Whenever I have a question, I can do a project to explore it and keep learning,” he said.

This year, he looked at using machine learning to optimize school funding allocations, with a goal of addressing inadequate and inequitable funding.

He aggregated hundreds of thousands of data points from the Colorado Department of Education to create a new dataset with student growth percentiles from three standardized tests across 22 demographics plus expenditures broken down by category for 1,728 schools in 183 districts. Then, using a machine learning model, he created a system to predict student performance based on changes to school funding. The spending efficiency of schools within a district also could be compared and ranked.

“I wanted to figure out a solution,” he said. “We can apply AI to funding.”

Nederland High senior Laila Waldron, who plans to major in biology as an undergrad and then earn a master’s in ecology, researched differences in floral biodiversity in burn areas and logged clear cut areas.

“I’ve always wanted to be a scientist,” she said. “It feels good to know there is something you can do about all the problems in the world. I was excited to learn taxonomy, and I learned a lot about statistics and fire ecology. It was pretty cool.”

She looked at an area burned in the Cold Springs Fire and a West Magnolia clear cut area. With the help of her mentor, who is a botanist, she catalogued all the plants along both sides of a 50-meter line in five spots at each site. She didn’t find a measurable difference between the two sites.

“As we get a drier climate and have more fires, clear cutting is a more controllable method and you still have a functioning ecosystem,” she said.