KIDS IN ACTION
SKYE’S LIMIT THE
Bend high schooler wins prestigious science award By Elizabeth Warnimont | Photo by Maile Mason
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ummit High School freshman Skye Knox came home a winner after attending the 2022 nationwide Broadcom Masters STEM competition in Washington, D.C. last fall. Her cloud seeding project won her a place among 30 national semi-finalists and a top technology award that she will use to attend a nine-day science camp in Maui this summer. Using materials provided by the Bend Science Station, a learning facility offering science educational programs for third- to 12th-graders, Knox created a simulation model that could test various chemical compounds for seeding clouds to produce rain. The impetus of the idea was Knox’s desire to discover cloudseeding materials that were less environmentally damaging than the previously favored silver iodide, which proved to be significantly harmful to sea life in past experiments begun in 1946. She learned from a science article that the silver iodide worked in part because its structure was chemically like that of water crystals. When she saw a rocket launcher another student had constructed at the science station, Knox got the idea to modify
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that device for use with her own experiment. “I noticed how the moisture built up inside the bottle (a clear 2-liter soda bottle), and I saw that it could be used to make a cloud chamber. I tried some other methods, but I found that this was the easiest. When I released the pressure into the bottle, the light sensor could measure the density of the cloud. The darker the cloud was, the less light would get through.” “Finding the right chemicals to use was really hard,” she says. “There was a lot of trial and error. One chemical that didn’t work would coat the inside of the bottle and prevent light from coming through, so the sensor was measuring the density of the substance instead of the cloud.”
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Finding the right chemicals to use was really hard. There was a lot of trial and error. ” – Skye Knox
In the end, Knox’s experiment didn’t produce the results she expected, but in the context of the scientific process, that doesn’t make it any less valuable. “In the future I want to experiment with different temperatures,” she says. “Since clouds are high-altitude,