UPDATE: Two Fort St. John students bound for Canada-Wide Science Fair

UPDATE: Information on the other Fort St. John student competing in the Canada-Wide Science Fair has been added.

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. – More than 400 students will gather in Ottawa for the Canada-Wide Science Fair on May 26th, including Emily Mineault and Brendan Hill, two students from Fort St. John. 

A total of 52 students from British Columbia will travel to the fair to compete and showcase their projects, which range from aerospace and agriculture to energy and natural resources.

Brendan Hill from Fort St. John will present their model rocket development program project, and Emily Mineault will showcase the differentiation between artificial intelligence and student writing.

“I’m very excited, this is a really big opportunity,” Mineault said. 

Mineault has been entering science fairs since grade four and is delighted to be able to compete for the first time at the Canada-Wide Science Fair as a seventh grader. 

Students can enter the Canada-Wide Science Fair starting in grade seven, meaning Mineault will be one of the youngest students competing in Ottawa, along with 41 other seventh graders.

Mineault says she intends to continue competing in science fairs every year until she graduates from high school. She also wants to pursue a career in STEM and attend an Ivy League school, such as Harvard. 

The project Mineault will present at the fair focuses on artificial intelligence and compares AI-generated material to human-generated material. Specifically, Mineault will be testing teachers’ ability to differentiate between essays written by AI and those written by students. 

“I want to see if teachers can tell the difference because I know a lot of students use AI,” Mineault said.

She ran her experiment with classmates and teachers at  Dr. Kearney Middle School, generating AI essays on topics similar to those written by her peers. 

Mineault then randomly selected multiple essays, mixed the AI-generated and student-written essays, and distributed the packets to teachers. The results of Mineault’s project will be displayed at the fair. 

Project presentations will be open to the public from May 26th to 31st at the Carleton University Fieldhouse, and awards will be distributed to participants on May 30th at the National Arts Centre.