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For MCCTC students, contest is elemental
By Denise Dick
canfield
Science and show business aren’t usually things you associate together, but students at Mahoning County Career and Technical Center put science center stage.
The students in Tom Slaven’s bio-technology classes and in Bob Miller’s chemistry classes submitted videos to the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s It’s Elemental contest.
Each video highlights an element from the Periodic Table of the Elements and students discuss its history, properties and applications.
Seniors Ashley Snipes, 17, of Struthers, and Karly Balog, 18, of Jackson-Milton, were part of a team that chose iridium.
Karly portrayed scientist Smithson Tennant for the minimovie and Ashley narrated.
The selected iridium, an element used as a hardening agent, because they wanted an element that was more obscure.
It took a few days to come up with the script.
“Once we found out that iridium was in the asteroid [that hit the earth and] led to the extinction of the dinosaurs, it kind of came together,” Karly said.
“We knew we had to put dinosaurs in there,” Ashley added.
They called their team Rainbow Meteors. Seniors Jordan Woolley from Austintown Fitch and Ontario Miller of Jackson-Milton were the other team members.
Other MCCTC students also submitted videos featuring meitnerium, plutonium and berkelium.
People can log on to the Chemical Heritage Society website at www.chemheritage.org/discover/chemistry-in-history/its-elemental/index.aspx to view the videos and vote.
To access the videos, click on a particular element and a list of videos submitted comes up, identifying individual schools. Viewers may vote for their favorites.
Winners also will be judged by a panel of chemists.
Slaven said judging will evaluate each video’s scientific presentation and inclusion of an element’s history, technical merit and the overall artistry.
MCCTC submitted four videos from juniors in bio-tech and one from a senior.
Students in the school’s interactive multimedia classes taped the videos, but Slaven’s students did their own editing.
“They got to learn not only the science but the technology, too,” the teacher said.
Another student, Samantha Wood, a senior from Springfield High School, will compile all of the student videos to create an interactive periodic table of the elements. It will be her senior project.
This is the first year that Slaven’s students have entered the contest, and he said he was impressed with the work they did.
The contest commemorates 2011 as the International Year of Chemistry.