Pictured top row, left to right:  Rekha Dhillon-Richardson, Eliza Brody,  Maddie Stahlecker,  Noelle Goudy, Sophia Haegly, Alivia Villari. Bottom row, left to right: Hannah Clarke, Mason Rode, Gabby Dunning, Anya Lesser, May Naish, Joe Conlin.

For the fifth time in six years, a Springside Chestnut Hill Academy (SCH) student has won Best of Fair at the George Washington Carver Science Fair, where many of the most advanced science students in the city compete. This year’s top award was earned by SCH junior Rekha Dhillon-Richardson for studying the effect of emissions from car and bus idling on student health.

In addition to bringing home the top award, SCH students also received first place in four of the nine categories they entered and almost half of the possible medals in those categories. Twenty out of 24 students received honors, and a number of students also won specialty awards. Their research projects ranged from a study of Martian soil and how it can be changed to enable the cultivation of human food, how sleep deprivation affects alpha and beta wave production and how food surface and type affect bacteria growth.

Science has been a consistently strong focus at SCH Academy, said Scott Stein, chair of the Science Department, who himself is a former teacher of the year and was recently honored with a Brighter Futures Award by the City of Philadelphia’s Intellectual disAbility Services for his long-term work with United Cerebral Palsy (UCP).

The work with UCP is indicative of the kind of real-world-oriented learning that takes place at SCH Academy. For the past decade, Stein has offered interested Upper School science students the chance to work on projects that address individuals’ specific needs as served by UPC’S Chestnut Hill branch. In one year, that work involved developing motorized watering cans for clients who love gardening. Over the past several years, students have worked on mechanical and electrical switches for clients with a variety of physical disabilities to enable them to participate in games that help build their motor skills and self-esteem.

“The Applied Physics and Engineering class focusing on UCP is just one example of how we challenge students to engage with actual problems beyond the classroom and to use their scientific inquiry and design thinking skills to develop solutions,” Stein said. “The awards our students received at the Carver Science Fair are the most recent recognition of their efforts to understand and address problems they’re seeing around them.”