Hooray, we had another STEM Fair, revived from our Covid gap in 2020-2022. The Fair has been picked up by the VCU STEM Education Department, and they successfully pulled off their second one this month. There were about 118 exhibits, and over 200 students who created projects for the competition. The categories were shifted slightly: in years before, the astronomy exhibits were included in the “Earth & Space Sciences” category. This year, astronomy was included in “Physics and Astronomy.” I like the change-it makes us a little more visible as a separate field.
The winners are Tanish Singh and Abhinav Tadinada, from Godwin High School, who created a very impressive project, named “Novel Application of Quantum Machine Learning for Pulsar Classification using Qubit-Based Encoding and Bloch Sphere Mapping.” RAS presented them with $100 each. And, of course, a Milky Way candy bar.
