Ames Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Ames, Iowa
Ames Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Ames, Iowa
Ames, Iowa -- North Polk High School in Alleman and Ankeny High School took first and second place respectively at the Iowa Adventures in Supercomputing (AiS) Expo, hosted by the U. S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University (ISU) on April 24. The AiS Expo is designed to give students from participating Iowa high schools an opportunity to showcase their talents in supercomputing programming.
According to Barbara Helland, assistant program director for Ames Lab's Applied Mathematical Sciences Program and AiS coordinator, the primary goal of AiS is to foster the participation of high school students in mathematics, science and computing.
The first-place winners from North Polk included students Sara Karbeling, Anna Keyte and Josh Kortbein. They worked with teacher/coaches Bruce Bennett, Connie Boyd and Rosalie Eimers to lead North Polk to its victory with their project, "The Chaotic Tumbling of Hyperion." Hyperion is a misshapen moon of the planet Saturn. Using equations developed by researchers who analyzed photos of Hyperion taken by Voyager 2, the students were able to explore and quantify for themselves the chaotic nature of Hyperion's rotation about its own axis.
The Ankeny student team of Ben Jones, Joe Henderson, Andy Lynch, Darren Semrow and Brian Thompson, coached by teachers Karen O'Loughlin and Deanna Poudel, took second place with "Silence in the Night," an attempt to determine the utmost in stealth technologies by discovering the shape with the greatest ability to diffract or disperse oncoming radar waves.
The teams from North Polk and Ankeny will travel to Washington, D.C, in June to represent Iowa at the DOE's National AiS Expo.
In addition to placing first in the AiS Expo, student teams from North Polk took honors in other Expo prize categories, winning third place in the overall competition and receiving recognition for the best display and best written report. Student teams from Ankeny and Humboldt won the student choice award.
Ames Laboratory is operated for the DOE by ISU. The Lab conducts research into various areas of national concern, including energy resources, high-performance computing, environmental cleanup and restoration, and synthesis and study of new materials.
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