Kushal Naik, 14, didn't finish in the money last week in the four-day Young Scientist Challenge near Washington, but he beat out hundreds of other students just to make the finals.
He qualified by winning first place in biochemistry and third place overall among eighth-graders with an experiment that showed what causes sliced apples to turn brown. That experiment was part of the regional Delaware Valley Science Fairs event held in March in Fort Washington, Pa.; at the time, Kushal was an eighth-grader at H.B. du Pont Middle School near Greenville.
Out of 1,900 people who responded to the challenge for grades five through eight, 400 semifinalists were chosen in August, and the list was culled to 40 in September, said Katie McCormick, a spokeswoman for the event.
The competition is meant to get students excited about science at an age when programs for them begin to wane, she said.
Kushal, now a freshman at the Charter School of Wilmington, said the polymer experiment that was part of the competition was simple: He got all the ingredients and directions in the mail. The challenge was explaining it to others.
"They just want to see how I communicate the process to people, how the glue molecules and the Borax interact, atomically speaking, to create the polymer," he said before the competition. "They want the best young scientists, but also the best young science communicators who can communicate science to an audience."
Although he did not win a top prize, Kushal, along with six other finalists, was selected as a host for the Young Scientist show, which will air on Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and Discovery Kids early next year; a date is to be determined.
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