If you think about projects done by Germans, I guess engineering ones immediately come to mind. I am Jenny from Germany and I want to show you that Germans can do more than build fast cars.
First of all, I want to ask you a question: Do you like beetles? Don’t worry if you can’t answer now, but we’ll come back to this question later. The project that I was presenting at the London International Youth Science Forum was all about beetles. Three years ago I started collecting these fascinating creatures. The biggest problem for any beetle collector however, is finding out what type of beetle they actually are.
There is some literature available to help identify these beetles, but it can be costly, and difficult to use. I was really annoyed about this and so I started thinking about an alternative solution. This was when the idea of an identification programme for beetles came to mind. Because it would have been too much work to develop a programme for every beetle in the world, I chose one family to try my idea. I took the sample family Silphidae because of their relevance in forensic science. Silphidae are carrion beetles and they are used to determine when someone died.
Finally I had a list of twenty one species. Based on this, and their characteristics, I developed a kind of question tree.
My last task was to implement this tree into my programme. After much work, I had successfully created a programme which means beetles from the family Silphidae can be identified in just 2-3 minutes, compared to 20 minutes which is the average time taken using literature.
So why not go out in a park or forest, pick up a beetle and take a closer look at it. I promise you, you will discover a new universe. And then ask yourself again: Do you like beetles?
 |
| Students including Jenny talked about their various projects at the LIYSF Bazaar last month. To find out more about the London International Youth Science Forum visit www.liysf.org.uk |
No comments:
Post a Comment