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Student Wins Second in National Science Challenge

October 26, 2006
Jacob Hurwitz, a student at Robert Frost Middle School last year and Montgomery Blair High School this year, won the second place national award and a $10,000 scholarship in the 2006 Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge for middle school students.

The October 25 awards ceremony capped a four-day challenge for the top 40 finalists, including two days of intense competition at the National Institutes of Health that featured a series of challenges on the causes and impact of global health concerns.

Hurwitz won the second prize honor for his project “Disumbocoblated” (with partner Scott Yu, who also attended Frost and is at Blair this year) and for his excellent performance during the competition. Yu won the Discovery Health “Forensics Camp” award and was chosen by the finalists as the student speaker at the ceremony.

“Disumbocoblated,” Hurwitz’s and Yu’s eighth grade science project, studied people’s understanding of word permutations, examining demographic factors such as a subject’s education, family history, and school attendance. They composed six paragraphs and wrote a computer program to scramble the letters in the paragraphs’ words. Students at their school read the permutated paragraphs and answered five comprehension questions. Hurwitz and Yu found that intensive scrambling slowed the volunteers’ reading and lowered their comprehension. Subjects who attended preschool or whose parents attended college performed best, and subjects with frequent school absences performed worst.

David Tao, an eighth grade student at Takoma Park Middle School and now a student at Blair, was among the 40 finalists. His project was “Parasitic Crawling Vines and Their Impact on Native Flora.” The finalists were selected for their scientific reasoning and ability to communicate the goals and outcomes of their projects. Hurwitz, Yu and Tao are all freshmen in the Science, Mathematics, Computer Science Magnet Program at Blair.

Discovery Communications and Science Service created the Discovery Challenge Young Scientist Challenge in 1999 to help address America’s chronic underachievement in science and math. The challenge identifies and honors America’s top middle school student who demonstrates the best skills in leadership, teamwork and scientific problem solving. More than 13,000 students have entered the competition since it began eight years ago. Approximately $700,000 in scholarships have been awarded in that time.

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