Barrington Student Headed for Regional Science Fair

News Report

A sixth-grader at Barrington Middle School is headed to regional competition in Lakeland April 3 after winning top honors at the Hillsborough County Science and Mathematical Fair last month.

Yasmine Aziz impressed STEM Fair judges with her project, "The Color of Blood: How Does Color Affect Blood Pressure?", winning second place overall in the behavioral and health science category as well as an award from the International Society for Optics and Photonics.

Azis said her hypothesis was that brighter colors, such as red and yellow, would have a greater affect on blood pressure.

A former student at Riverview Montessori School, Aziz enlisted the help of 14 children at the school, age 4 to 6. She hooked them up to a blood pressure monitor and then showed them photographs of different colors. The experiment proved out her hypothesis that the color red increased blood pressure while the color green lowered it.

Aziz is the student of Barrington science teacher Leah Shaffer.

Also taking honors at the STEM Fair were Barrington eighth-grader Ben Simon, who received a second place in the computer science category and won the Seminole Electric Environmental Science Award; eighth-grader Kyle Santos, who won the Association of Fertilizer and Phosphate Chemists Certificate of Achievement for an Outstanding Science Fair Project; and eighth-grader Madison Kinney who was awarded the United States Air Force Certificate of Achievement for Outstanding Science or Engineering Fair Project.