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Students in the Principles of Engineering class at Onalaska High School put all of things they have learned this year to the test at the Southeast Minnesota/Western Wisconsin Regional Science and Engineering Fair on Feb. 29 at St. Mary’s University.

Eleven students, under the direction of their teacher, Jason Ludwigson, competed in the fair, which placed the students up against 150 projects to be judged by a panel of expert judges. Nathan Love and Kyle Edmunds, along with another Onalaska team, James Pauer and Paul Zimmer, had winning projects that received the right to move onto the Badger State Science and Engineering Fair and put decent cash prize in their pockets.

The students were tasked to create an engineering project using the engineering design process. They had to brainstorm ideas, research all of the possibilities and then construct a prototype that would, in theory, be used to implement their ideas.

“Kyle just said, ‘hey, what about this,’ so we researched the feasibility of creating our brainstormed idea because we were experimenting with an entire new field,” said Love, who partnered with fellow senior Edmunds to create microbial fuel cell that would make the metabolic process found in bacteria generate electricity, which would be used as alternative source of power.

“The entire project took about 120 hours of midnight work, usually involving large amounts of Mountain Dew and coffee,” said Edmunds, “We were actually quite shocked when we finished it.”

The other team advancing to the state event — Pauer and Zimmer, another team of seniors — redesigned and constructed wind turbines to help reduce the impact of the turbines on the migratory patterns of birds.

“We weren’t really serious about it in the beginning, but as we worked on the design, we really started to get into it and have fun,” Zimmer said.

The Love/Edmunds team won the Director’s Creativity Award and second place in the Overall Science competition, and the Zimmer/Pauer team took second place in the Environmental Science division.

Zimmer and Pauer will represent their project at Badger State Fair this Saturday, where they will compete for scholarships, computers and the privilege to compete at the International Science and Engineering Fair.

Edmunds and Love were forced to decline their trip to the state event due to conflicts with the date.

This was Onalaska’s first year competing at the Science and Engineering Fair, but it definitely will not be their last. “It was a good learning experience,” Ludwigson said. “Given the time and amount of information that they were given, they did very well; they worked hard and placed well.”

In the end, the victory still seems unreal for some Onalaska team members.

“It’s weird to think that our one-month long study beat out other projects that were college-level, thesis studies that people had been working on for their entire high school careers, like modifying bacterial DNA. We were extremely surprised that we even made it” said Edmunds. “It was epic!”