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People are fond of saying kids spend too much time on their phones, but Adam Hamdaqa, a Grade 7 student at Pierrefonds Community High School, used his cellphone to help design an award-winning science project.
Adam, 12, recently won first prize at Hydro-Québec’s Montreal Regional Science and Technology Fair, beating out dozens of older high school and CEGEP students.
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He won for his Guardian Helmet project, in which the helmet app he designed tracks how fast a person is riding a bicycle and automatically calls someone if it detects a fall. It was one of 83 projects submitted to the fair.
Adam began explaining the project, talking of amplitude of acceleration, vectors and the Pythagorean theorem, easily losing this journalist, who hasn’t studied science for a few decades.
“I bought a helmet and just fixed it to my liking,” Adam said. Ah, that’s better.
Riders can program into the app who they want to send the alert message to. In Adam’s case, it’s his mother, because, as he says, she’s his guardian, hence the name of the project, which refers to that function but also the fact that the helmet guards one’s head.
“She takes care of me as well as my dad, but my dad travels a lot; he just came back from Japan,” Adam said.
His dad is a computer engineering professor at the École Polytechnique.
“I shouldn’t be using the phone on the road if I’m biking,” Adam said. “I should be focused on what I’m doing so I don’t get injured. In addition to that, I put my phone in the back (of the helmet) so I won’t be able to take it out and play with it while I’m doing the activity I’m doing.”
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Adam won a $750 bursary and a trophy and will now participate in the Hydro-Québec Super Expo-sciences provincial finals April 19-21, 2024 at the CÉGEP du Vieux Montréal.
Two other students from Pierrefonds Community High School, Isolde McKay and Sophia Ross, were among the 15 finalists singled out for their projects at the same science fair. They will compete at the Quebec finals this month with their HydroPure project.
“It’s a portable water-purification system,” said Isolde, who is in Grade 10. “There are three parts to it. The first part was creating a detection system that is able to identify the micro-organisms in our environmental water sample. The second part was finding the best compound for disinfecting the micro-organisms … our final aim was creating a purification system.”
She was excited to make it to the finals.
“It was a bit shocking at first,” Isolde said. “I know people had told me and my partner we were going to make it, but part of me didn’t believe it.”
Adam had expressed similar shock. “I was surprised, I really did not expect that I would win. I was there for the fun of being there and meeting new people who have a love for science like me.”
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