1 week Ago By Devon Dekuyper
Sixteen-year-old Lillian Zhang hopes to eventually become a mechanical engineer — she’s getting a head start at the Calgary Youth Science Fair. Zhang, a Grade 11 student at Western Canada High School, designed and built an exoskeleton to help a person with hypotonia — a medical condition that causes decreased muscle tone — with walking. “The goal of my project was to test if a lower limb exoskeleton can help a person with hypotonia walk more evenly and safely,” she said.
She came up with the idea for the project in 2023, when her grandfather slipped and fell on ice. Initially, she wanted to come up with a device to assist seniors, but her prototype was too heavy to be practical, so she looked for other uses. A chance meeting with a girl who has hypotonia led to a revamp of the project.
Because hypotonia can affect any muscle in the body, Zhang’s exoskeleton was designed for and successfully tested on the girl. “When she walks with the exoskeleton on, there is a balanced weight between both feet,” she said, “and the shift of her centre of mass becomes more symmetrical and balanced.” Zhang completed the entire project — which included programming motors, 3D printing, laser cutting and testing with motion-tracking software — with minimal help.
“Essentially, I just followed a lot of YouTube videos, and I prayed for the best, because I don’t really have a mentor,” she said. “I burned a couple motors because I didn’t know what I was doing.” Hundreds of students science fair projects seen at Calgary Youth Science Fair this weekend Zhang’s is among hundreds of projects featured at the Calgary Youth Science Fair, taking place Friday and Saturday at the University of Calgary’s Olympic Oval.
This year’s fair has 611 projects by students from more than 100 schools. The competition is judged by hundreds of professionals in scientific fields from across Calgary. The top 15 students will be headed to the Canada-wide fair in Fredericton, N.
B., in early June. “What some of these kids do is almost beyond comprehension,” said Alex Gierus, president of the Calgary Youth Science Fair Society.
“Some of them are lined up with university researchers, so they’re doing university level, lab-type work,” he said. “Some of them are creating patentable technologies that they later turn into a business.” Gierus said there’s a wide spectrum of topics at the fair each year, but he’s recently noticed a rise in projects about artificial intelligence.
Rishithi Shivanurthy, a Grade 9 student at Fairview School, focused her project on the positive and negative effects of AI. “I thought maybe this science fair platform was a good chance to try to research something that I was interested in, because I see that lots of people are thinking about this,” Shivanurthy said. She found youth are most negatively affected, with AI affecting social skills, learning processes and digital literacy.
There are more benefits for seniors, such as health-care, transportation and cognitive assistance. Mansukh Virdi, a Grade 7 student at the STEM Innovation Academy, built a self-driving car, which is programmed to drive along a black line. He also included a face-detection feature that causes the car to stop when a face is detected in front of it.
Virdi said he had some help from his school through the science fair club, but did most of the project on his own. “The hardest part was probably the programming,” he said. The fair is open to the public Saturday from 9 a.
m. to 12 p.m.
at the Olympic Oval. — Postmedia News.
