Five Lewiston High School sophomores whose projects were judged to be the best in this year’s Lewiston High School Science Fair were honored during the school’s annual Night of Excellence on May 29.

Taylor Roy’s experiment exploring the relationship between a person’s signature and their personality took first place.

During this year’s fair, some 200 LHS sophomores explored a wide variety of research interests. Mikaela St. Laurent, second place, wondered whether the distance between individual dominoes in a line would affect the acceleration rate at which the line falls, and Jared Dumas, third place, investigated how the placement of the vertical stabilizer on a model airplane would affect the aircraft’s flight.

Emily Cloutier and Brooke Leger tied for fourth place. Cloutier investigated whether blood-related people have more similarities in their fingerprints than people who are not related, and Leger determined the temperature of water in which a bowling ball will sink due to density differences.

For the first time, students this year presented their projects electronically, rather than on display boards. The projects were assessed by judges from Bates College, Central Maine Community College and the high school. The first round of judging took place in classrooms as students presented their projects to judges and other students.

“We had many positive comments and feel that the PowerPoint presentations in small groups are the way to go,” said Laurie Haines, the Lewiston High science teacher who oversees the fair. “This type of presentation format is becoming the norm in colleges and is great experience for our sophomores.”

Bates College, a sponsor of the fair, welcomed the winners for an afternoon visit to the Bates campus that included an opportunity to perform an experiment in a college chemistry lab. The winning students spent several hours at the college as guests of two Bates students who, as volunteers, helped organize the fair for the last three years: seniors (and now recent graduates) Andrew Kageleiry of Dover, N.H. and Colby Maldini of New Castle, N.H.

“Andrew and Colby were great to work with,” said Haines. “These two guys were took the job of science fair coordinators seriously. They will be missed.”