School Science Fair, which was held at the premises of International School Savremena in December, enabled Savremena’s students to continue their scientific adventure for several more days after the visit to the Science Festival and enjoy discovering scientific phenomena.
They examined the evolution and development of natural phenomena, discovered the secrets of chemistry, physics, biology and psychology, carried out experiments, listened to, but also held interesting lectures and enriched their knowledge in a fun way.
How chemistry plays with colours
The first day of the School Science Fair was dedicated to chemistry and featured experiments and a lecture about colours, colour changes and how colors are used in everyday lives.
Since some Savremena’s students, Danilo Stokanić and Jovan Radovanović are real chemistry aficionados, they eagerly offered to help to prepare all the required solutions for the experiments, thus showing their classmates and school friends how science can be fun.
What the students in the audience found particularly exciting was mixing various substances in the test tubes, and were impressed by the color changes of different chemicals after changing their concentration. The lecture that followed the experiments was about detecting compounds using colors, which is the basis of modern qualitative chemical analysis. This was also a great opportunity to touch upon astro-chemistry and how we detect compounds in space.
Physics – VR trip into space
During the second day of the School Science Fair, physics teacher Ana Vlašić held a lecture on the optical system and its evolution and development in animals and humans.
In this presentation, symbolically titled I, eye, Savremena’s students were impressed to learn how this important sensory organ has developed into its current state from a simple sensory system of a few cells that can only tell light from shadow.
The lecture was completed with a discussion about lenses and how nearsighted and farsighted people can have their vision corrected. It goes without saying that the lecture was made even more exciting with VR glasses, which took Savremena’s students far away from the classroom and into space, helped them see how one type of lenses worked in practice, but also introduced them to the topic of the second lecture, held by Year 12 student Nikola Milutinović.
Nikola made a great effort to bring the complex subject of astrophysics closer to the audience of his peers, also showing and explaining them the concept of planetary motion. The discussion moved on to satellites and spacecraft, and ended with a thunderous round of applause for Nikola’s effort and knowledge.
Psychology – should we fear fear?
Taking into account that psychology is one of the most popular subjects at International School Savremena, as many as three students, Miona Tofilovski, Una Grzunov, and Gordana Hrkalović prepared lectures on different aspects of fear – Miona talked about the fear among adolescents, Gordana about fear of stress, but the audience particularly enjoyed Una’s lecture, during which they discussed fear among criminals and prison inmates.
After the students’ presentations, psychology teacher Nikola Samac explained the evolution of fear in the Homo sapiens, and most important, talked about the necessity of fear in the context of evolutionary advantages.
Biology – DNA day
During the final day of School Science Fair Y12 students, Tara Ćulibrk, Nikola Milutinović and Aleksandar Zaplatić performed an experiment in which they extracted DNA from the cheek cells of a few volunteers from the audience.
After the experiment, the students listened to a lecture held by biology teacher Nadežda Golubović and learned how food and drinks change our DNA. As an example of natural clones, the twins Lenard and Andrej Rstić proved how natural clones (twins) can have the same DNA, but be different due to different gene activity.
The visit to the Science Festival and School Science Fair were a great chance to bring science closer to students. In addition, Savremena’s students gained substantial knowledge and learnt about exciting scientific discoveries.