Three Surrey students land awards at Canada Wide Science Fair

Three Surrey students had a great showing at last month's Canada Wide Science Fair, taking home a combined seven awards in the national competition with their ingenious projects.

Timothy Cai of Fraser Heights Secondary, Robin Yadav of Queen Elizabeth Secondary and Nathan Yeung of SAIL each received awards for their projects, which showcased homemade versions of scaled-down commercial rockets, time management and productivity improvements for students and office staff, and automated drones to combat wildfires.

Cai received an impressive five accolades for his project, An Investigation into Active Control for Accessible Orbital Flight, including gold in the senior category of the Excellence Awards, as well as the Challenge Award for Curiosity & Ingenuity, the Platinum Award for Innovation, and both the $7,000 and $1,000 Youth Can Innovate Awards.

The Grade 11 student examined the feasibility of developing smaller, cheaper homemade rockets capable of controlled flight, with the ability? to fly straight as an arrow and land vertically.

Yeung was awarded silver in the junior category of the Excellence Awards for Hyperfocus: A New Kind of Timer. The SAIL student designed an online timer for synced group sessions that holds teammates accountable when working remotely. The use of a shared timer creates a psychological motivation to avoid procrastination and finish work under the same deadlines.

Yadav received bronze in the senior category of the Excellence Awards for Wildfire Drone Automation Using Deep Learning. The QE senior experimented with deep learning to train a drone to recognize fire and fly along a fire front in a simulation. The goal of his project is to provide firefighters a safer way to detect and fight wildfires while also more effectively increasing emergency response time and reducing the spread of wildfires.

Congratulations to all of our Canada Wide Science Fair winners!