Dahlia Dry wins Best of Fair
A former Sanibel School student took home the Thomas Alva Edison Kiwanis Science and Engineering Best of Fair Award for physical sciences.
An awards ceremony was held for approximately 150 students at Florida Gulf Coast University, at Alico Arena, Wednesday, Feb. 15. More than 350 students, who won at their school level science fair, competed in the 60th annual Thomas Alva Edison Kiwanis Science and Engineering Fair.
“It’s pretty cool,” Fort Myers High School sophomore Dahlia Dry said. “I wasn’t really expecting it. Pretty cool and exciting.”
The Sanibel resident will head to California in May for five days for the international competition. She was one of seven students chosen.
“I’m really excited about going to internationals,” she said. “It makes me more ambitious at achieving my goals in a science related field.”
After graduating from high school, Dry wants to do her undergraduate studies in computer science and then purse physics, or chemistry for her graduate studies.
Dry created predictive models that were more, if not the same accuracy, that meteorological forecasting is currently using. The difference, meteorologists take information from a bigger scale, including such information as high, low pressure systems and seasonality. Her project took the same information from the bottom up.
“There were two week trials that data collected once every minute,” Dry said.
A mini computer fed into a wind beam to measure the temperature, which provided data points. That data was put into a modeling program, which provided Dry with the ability to predict the next data points in the sequence.