Timber Ridge Crystal Growing Competition Archives

Timber Ridge Crystal Growing Competition

Back in March we posted about some East Cobb students who had created a virtual contest for Cobb students in the scientific endeavor of crystal growing.

The group is called STARS (for Structural Nucleic Acid Anticancer Research Society), which formed in 2019 in conjunction with students at Timber Ridge Elementary School.

STARS parent Susanna Huang got in touch to announce the winners of the 2021 Timber Ridge Crystal Growing Competition that the groups hosted together.

The group created introductory videos to share various effective crystal growing methods with students as well as to teach the principles of crystallography. Toward the end of the crystal growing competition season, the STARS Team created another series of videos that explained the crystal submission steps, further facilitating the submission process for students.

The winners are:

Brooke Bloxom for the title of Most Exciting Experiment
Most Elaborate Experiment
Elliott Neveln for the title of Clearest Crystal
Jahnavi Bhargava for the titles of Most Natural-Looking crystal and the Best Quality Crystal
Johnny Dickerson for the title of Best Crystal Shape
Ms. Judy Osborne for the title of Most Inspiring Crystal
Michael Duke for the title of the Most Innovative Crystal
Steven Huang for the title of Most Impressive Notebook Entries
Ryoma Takagi for the titles of Most Detailed Lab Notebook and Largest Creative Crystals

Medals of Scientific Excellence:

Elliott Neveln for winning the Best Salt Crystal Award for the K-2nd grade division because his salt crystal alone had the highest clarity and his salt crystal alone had an almost perfect cubical shape.
Steven Huang for winning the Best Salt Crystal Award for the K-2nd grade division because his hand-written lab notebook was the most detailed and reflected much thoughtfulness and intuition.

Some other award winners:

Best Creative Crystal Award for the K-2nd division because his creative crystal looked like a real, natural crystal, with colors of blues and glints of shiny specks.

Michael Duke for winning the Best Creative Crystal Award for the 3rd-5th grade division because his creative crystal was the largest in his grade division and because his lab report was very thorough with detailed observations and conclusions.Ms. Judy Osborne for winning the Best Creative Crystal Award for the teacher division because her crystal was beautifully cultivated, and the quality of this crystal was very evident.

Ryoma Takagi for winning the Championship of the entire 2021 Timber Ridge Crystal Growing Competition for his solid mastery of growing aluminum potassium sulfate, exceptional observation and note-taking skills, and immense diligence, creating a 15 paged lab notebook with 176 data points, tracking the growth of 10 massive alum crystals before putting the data points into Excel graphs and charts to make the crystal growth trends even the more so evident.

The STARS team wrote in to say that over the summer they’re having a free, virtual summer camp to provide students with hands-on experiments and to teach students important note-taking and observational skills to further prepare them for the fall crystal growing competition.

Check their website for further details by clicking here.