I WAS delighted to be invited to act as one of several judges at the Awakeri School Science Fair that was held earlier this month.

I was informed that Awakeri School is the only school in our district that holds a science fair, and I can tell you it was an impressive display of science and technology education.

Awakeri school is located on State Highway 30 and has about 350 students enrolled and caters for students from years 1 to 8.

The school took in its first students in 1913, and has now been educating young kids in our community for just over 100 years.

In my time as mayor, I have heard a lot about the arts (and am a patron of the Whakatāne Society of Art & Craft) but I have heard very little about science, so the fair was quite a treat for me.

I believe that science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) are fundamental disciplines for life in the modern age.

In fact, without these disciplines there would be no modern age.

Putting aside the social, almost every man-made thing that you see around you is the result of STEM and unimaginably complex interactions and supply chains.

And yet, we seem to give little or no weighting to them.

I can’t help but ask why this is so?

Science is about inquiry, it’s about asking how nature works right down to the most fundamental level of atoms and sub-atomic particles.

Engineering is about how we apply fundamental understanding to make products and infrastructure that people use.

Maths is like the glue that holds science together.

According to the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, ‘the “wealth of nations” is the result of scientific inquiry – learning about the world around us – and social organisation that allows large groups of people to work together for the common good’.

Generally speaking, science is inquiry about how the world around us works.

In science, we talk about The Scientific Method but what is this method?

Philosophers have argued about what the method actually is for centuries. One highly influential philosopher of science, Sir Karl Raimund Popper (July 28, 1902-September 17, 1994) was an Austrian-British philosopher who had a strong connection to New Zealand having emigrated here in 1937 to become a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University.

At the Awakeri School Science Fair, I was delighted to see what students had achieved.

All the exhibits at the science fair adopted what I would classify as the scientific method.

All had a fixed format consisting of an introduction, describing the background of the field of inquiry.

A question or problem was posed and a hypothesis advanced.

Then the hypothesis was tested by experimentation in order to determine if the hypothesis was true or false, see graphic bottom left.

The standard at the fair was very high and all participants adhered to the scientific methodology described above.

As a result, judging was not an easy task and in my book everyone who entered the competition was a winner. However, it was a competition, and it is a judge’s job to make difficult decisions and that sometimes involves splitting hairs.

I’d like to acknowledge my fellow judges from EastPack, Eastbay REAP, Fonterra and OJI Fibre Solutions and commend these businesses for making staff available to support the endeavour.

The initial round of judging involved judges working in pairs to evaluate six or so entries.

Judges were then given a chance to speak to the contestants and probe into motivations and understanding of the work they were presenting.

All of these youngsters seemed to have a good grasp of what they were trying to do and how they would do it.

On completion of the initial round of judging of the six entries all of the judges picked their top one or two entries and they were then all discussed and debated with the other judges.

The first and second place- getters in the science section had two common features. They both delved into the fundamental property of a substance none of us can live without.

I am talking about water. Without water life as we know it would be impossible. It is the universal solvent in which the chemistry/biochemistry of all living things takes place.

Water, H2O, is a deceptively simple molecule but its properties and behaviour continues to occupy and intrigue scientists even to this day.

We all know that water can exist in three states under ‘normal’ conditions; solid, liquid and gas.

Water in its solid form is known as ice but did you know that there are many forms of ice in which the water molecules take different arrangements in a crystalline lattice.

It was only very recently that researchers at University College London and the University of Cambridge discovered a new type of ice that more closely resembles liquid water than any other known ices and that may rewrite our understanding of water and its many anomalies, see graphic below.

The winning entry focused on the question of how the shape of a block of ice affects the speed at which it melts.

This represents good fundamental inquiry into how the world of ice works which I must applaud.

Although every entrant at the science fair was a winner as far as I am concerned, I highlight the prize-winning entrants were: Maddyn Assink – first place, science; Eleanor James – first equal, technology; Aani Butterworth – first equal, technology.

Well done Awakeri.

-Victor Luca