Science Fair features competitions

The Sisters Science Club's Science Fair is featuring competitions to test the knowledge and skill of folks in the local community.

The 2015 Sisters Science Fair will be held Saturday, February 21, at Sisters High School from noon to 4 p.m. It's an exciting action-packed day filled with rockets and paper airplanes, astronomy and biology, pulleys and robots, and more.

Science and art join together to create an exciting contest called SciArt. This contest challenges students to find and capture science in the art of photography and is open to all students attending one of the Sisters schools. Winners will be displayed at the Sisters Science Fair. Both art and science must be evident in the photo and the images must be in a JPG format between 100K and 6Mb.

Each student can enter two images taken between June 16, 2014 and February 13, 2015. All entries are reviewed for technical compliance and judged by a panel of artists, scientists and engineers. SciArt 2015 entry forms are available on the Sisters Science Club website at http://www.sistersscienceclub.org and are due no later than February 13.

The popular Design, Construct, Compete (DCC) Challenge is changing this year. Instead of launching tennis balls as in past years, this year the challenge is to build a device that runs - and stops - using only mousetrap power. The device must be self-contained and its only source of power, from the moment of a neutral release until it comes to a complete stop, is the potential energy derived from one or more standard Victor-brand wooden snap-type mousetraps.

Participants can work individually or in teams and the contest is open to the entire community. Teams take turns releasing their cars from behind a line. If the car stops within the tip-off circle marked on the basketball court, that team advances to the next round, where the distance is increased. The winner is the team whose car stops within the target circle from the greatest distance. There are prizes, too. First place receives a check for $300, second place $150 and third place $100.

Registration forms and rules are available at the Sisters Science Club website, www.sistersscienceclub.org. Registration forms and a $25 deposit (refunded at the day of the contest when participants show up to compete) are due Friday, February 6.