Antonia Pavek, a third grade student at Tecumseh Elementary School in Farmingville, N.Y., was recently named a winner in this year’s Brookhaven National Laboratory Science Fair. Her name will be immortalized with a science fair banner in the cafeteria at Tecumseh.
Pavek’s science project titled, “Fast or Slow? A boat hull experiment,” was inspired by the Girl Scout Father/Daughter Raingutter Regatta event she participated in two years ago. She built a boat and raced it with the other girl scouts.
One day after that initial race, she rediscovered the boat sitting on the shelf when she came up with the idea of turning the boat race into a science fair experiment.
After narrowing down boat hull research designs, she wanted to find out which type of boat hull would be the fastest in a water channel, like she did in the Raingutter Regatta.
Pavek chose a few boat hull designs for her experiment: sailboat hulls (flat or round bottom), power-boat hulls (vee-hull or multi-hull), and dual pontoon boat (catamaran).
Ántonia built and modified the boats from standard model boat kits. She painted the boats and the sails. She weighed each boat hull to find the mass, measured the draft of each boat (how deep the boat is in the water) and recorded the data.
Then, Ántonia ran the experiment using a small battery operated fan to see which boat was the fastest in a water channel, recording data along the way. Ántonia discovered that the catamaran design was the fastest because it was the lightest, had the least amount of draft and was the most stable in the water channel. She also learned from their performance that each boat hull design is good for a certain purpose. The flat-bottom boats are better for a narrow water channel and the other designs may be better for the open sea.
