The blue ribbon winners at this year's Davidson Elementary Math Fair include, from left: Aubrey Dyckman (4th grade), Sydney Hennighausen and Julia Desmond (5th grade), and Nicholas Trovato (3rd grade)

From the appetites of sheep and goats to the weight of school backpacks — students at Davidson Elementary were able to find math in just about everything for this year’s annual Math Fair.

The fair featured 170 projects by over 200 students, showcasing scale models, measurement, probability, statistical analysis … and also Skittles, M&Ms, paper airplanes, and of course, Stephen Curry.

Students in grades 3-5 participated, hauling in three-fold display boards Tuesday morning and transforming the school gym into a math mecca.  Wednesday, teams of judges — consisting of retired educators, Davidson College professors and other members of the community — went through the projects and awarded ribbons to top entries.

First and second place winners advance to the Western Region Math Fair, to be held March 20 at Appalachian State University in Boone.  Davidson Elementary has a history of success at regional and state Math Fair competitions, having had first or second place finishers at state in four of the past five years.

Here’s the results from this year’s fair:

• Fifth Grade. 82 entries.  First place went to Julia Desmond and Sydney Hennighausen for their project “Are Backpacks at DES too heavy?” The short answer is yes, for all but kindergartners.  In fact, Julia and Sydney determined that 92 percent of 5th graders are carting around more than 20 percent of their body weight in class books. Ouch.  Second place was awarded to Kerry Dennis for his Lego scale model of the Great Pyramid of Khufu.  Kerry found that, among other things, the Egyptian wonder weighs “over two billion times more than mine.”  Third place went to Halynna Snyder for “Saving Energy and Money with your Dryer,” which proved that big loads are better.  Honorable mentions: Peter Simmons, “Using Right Triangles to Measure the Height of Objects;” and Austin and Blake Lambert, “Mileage Math.”
• Fourth Grade. 58 entries. First place honors went to Aubrey Dyckman for “Buy vs. Bring: Does it matter?” She looked at the nutritional value of bag lunches from home as compared to cafeteria purchases, and found that at DES school lunches tend to have more sodium, but less sugar and more fiber.  Second place was awarded to Ben Sellers for “Following the Ruptured Duck,” which looked at how much fuel a WWII plane might have used before it crashed off the coast of China. Third place went to Samuel Tarry‘s “How Does Heart Rate Change with Exercise?”  Honorable mentions: Ben Bragg, “I Deserve a Raise!”; and Davis Ashbrook, “Finding the Volume of Irregular Objects.”
• Third Grade, 30 entries. First place was awarded to Nicholas Travato for “Nick’s NASCAR Math” a game board with a NASCAR theme designed to help kids learn their multiplication tables.  This grade had a tie for second place, which means red ribbons were handed out to both Martha Kate Bragg for “Sheep or Goats – Who Can Eat the Most Grain in Five Minutes?” and also to Lindsay Green and Sadie Murphy for “Oh, the Places Scoops Go!”  The former found that Cookie the Sheep had the hoofs down biggest appetite, while the latter looked at how many scoops of Ben & Jerry’s are needed to, say, fill your bathtub.  (We don’t want you to try that one at home so we’ll just give you the answer: 1,365.33 scoops.) Third place went to Brandon Meeks for “Cost of Attending a Game.” Honorable mentions: Alex Mangiapane, “Penny vs Million Dollars.”