St Hilda’s Collegiate year 11 pupil Megha Senthilkumar, 15, conducted a nationwide study on how sleep affects adolescent pupils by surveying 249 schools across New Zealand.
John McGlashan College year 9 pupil Adam Ludgate, 14, discovered two planetary nebulas.
For their efforts, Megha won the Aurora Energy Best in Fair award and Adam won the New Zealand Oil & Gas most promising year 9-13 scientist award at the Aurora Energy Otago Science and Technology fair this year.
The fair’s awards convener Dr Steven Sexton said Megha’s project was so thorough and impressive he would have put her up for the prime minister’s prize if she had been old enough.
For Adam’s project, he said it was much beyond what the judges would be able to comment on and they would need an astrophysics specialist to adequately judge what he was doing.
Megha said her research was motivated by her struggling with sleep and school work.
"I found myself sleeping late and the next day I was tired and often angry and sad.
She wanted to play cricket for New Zealand and become a doctor, and hoped her research would help deal with the stress of a high work load.
"My biggest idea to solve this problem is delaying school starts.
"Especially for senior students who have to tackle more stress due to NCEA and other commitments."
It was nice to receive the recognition for her research.
She hoped in the future she would be able to use it to do more work in the same area.
Adam said he was inspired to do his research by his dad who had discovered a planetary nebula earlier this year, named Ludgate 1.
"I decided that for this year’s project I should do something similar to that because I am very fortunate and I have access to a remote telescope where I can image and collect data."
He was stoked that the project was a success after a long process.
"It was very exciting, like throughout the process, as you’re going through and starting to meet more and more of the requirements to actually be the planetary nebula — it’s undiscovered, it’s got the white dwarf in the middle.
"It was quite cool."
The two planetary nebulas Adam discovered were named Ludgate 2 and Ludgate 3.
He won $500 at the fair and said he did not know what he was going to do with it.
"There’s a chance it will go towards some music equipment and stuff like that — fuelling hobbies."
