After two months of hard work, middle school students at Saint Margaret Regional School in Buzzards Bay unveiled their science projects on Tuesday, February 8 during the school's science fair.

Students participating in the fair were broken up in two groups based on science teacher Pamela Caradimos' curriculum. Fifth graders competed for the top spot in invention and technology projects, while students in grades six through eight designed experiment-based projects following the scientific method.

Several Wareham students showed off their work.

Fifth grader Joseph Downing, 10, said he got his idea for the "Organized Doggie XL400" leash from watching the news and hearing about leash and doggie clean-up laws. The leash, complete with removable flashlight and baggies, even has a pedometer attached to serve as motivation when you walk Fido. "I wanted to improve quality of life by making it easier for people obey the laws," Downing explained.

Eleven-year-old Hannah Grassi, also a fifth grader, developed the "Compound Erase Glove" to help her teachers keep track of the two types of erasers that they need to wipe down blackboards and whiteboards. She explained that she got the idea when she was writing on both boards and kept misplacing the erasers. "I learned from doing this project how helpful it is to be organized," she noted.

Sixth grader Kali Fernandes, 12, presented her "Lay it Up" experiment. Her study examined the effect of positive and negative reinforcement on human performance and stress. "I tested it on my sister, Kia, when she was at basketball practice," she explained.

Fernandes got some help from her dad, the school's basketball coach. "I wanted to show him yelling doesn't help players win," she said. Her hypothesis stated positive reinforcement would yield better player performance, but in the end she found out that dad knows best. Her results showed stress appears to maximize performance. "When you're being yelled at you want to do it better," she concluded.

Caradimos couldn't have been happier with the students' submissions. "This is great," she touted. "Like Obama said in the State of the Union, we need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair."

Students were ranked based on oral presentations of their findings and on their poster board displays. Each grade will have a first-, second-, third-, and fourth-place winner and an honorable mention. Teachers will also hand out awards based on the students' research papers and journal logs from their projects later in the school year. Check out WarehamVillageSoup.com for a recap of the winners!

Judges included Captain Elizabeth Stevenson, Lt. Kurt DeCicco, and Michael Ortiz of the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, Sea Rogers Williams of the National Marine Life Center, Nancy Dunn, of the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, and Dylan O'Neill of the Upper Cape Cod Regional Technical School.

Saint Margaret’s educates approximately 225 children from kindergarten through eighth grade from various towns on the south coast, including Wareham.