CC Projects

After the new year the boys had a few projects due in their classes. In Essentials each year the students complete a research paper called "Faces of History". They each choose a historical figure, research that person and then write a report. On the day they read their report in front of the class some choose to dress up as their character. Below, Conner is dressed as Gandhi, while he reads his report. Riley wrote about Genghis Kahn, but decided not to dress up - the leather armor proved too difficult to duplicate.

Over the Christmas break and several weekends after Tegan worked very hard on his science project. He chose an experiment regarding pain management. This was right up his alley. He and his subjects all played video games (for the sake of science) while inflicting pain upon themselves.

Hypothesis: Mental distractions can aid in pain relief

Findings: Mental distractions not only help with pain relief, but they also decrease the pain sensor communication, so less pain is registered by the brain. His study only involved acute pain (all subjects held their foot in a bowl of ice water for as long as possible while playing the video game of their choice), but based on what he learned about the brain in this study, the same information could be transferred to chronic pain as well. As an interesting side note Tegan found that his female subjects tended to have a higher tolerance for pain than his male subjects, but he's leaving that to further study :).

This is the board he prepared, detailing his experiment.

We met with the majority of the other Challenge B students in Colorado for a group science fair where they were all judged on their experiment, process, and presentation - a great experience for them all. Tegan ended up receiving 2nd place for his work.