Competitions

Here are some of our favorite competitions!

Linnean Society Portrait Competition (Jonathan: runner up)

This was my favorite competition ever. Carl Linnaeus is my favorite scientist because he described many animals and made their scientific names easy to use and say. He was also just like me when he was young: always looking for animals and describing them. The task was to draw a self-portrait with a plant that is important somehow. Below is the description of the portrait and why I drew it.

The carnivorous Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) is my most favorite plant. In the United States, Venus flytrap in the wild can only be found two states over from where I live, in North Carolina. When I was almost 4, I wanted so much to see one in real life that, after I spent a couple of hours looking for them, I persuaded a scientist at the National Botanical Garden in Washington DC  to bring one from their back office collection. When the trap closed around the tip of the botanist’s pencil,  I squealed with joy so loudly that a huge crowd gathered and more plants were brought out, to my absolute happiness and amazement. For my 5th birthday, mom took me to a local carnivorous plants farm and I started growing them at home. I love feeding them insects (which I also grow and study at home), observe their behavior, and compare eaten and uneaten insects under my microscope. I have also infected many of my schoolmates with the love for carnivorous plants.     

I guess I did not know it when I was 3, but the reason I love Venus flytrap so much is because it shows how ingenious evolution is. It is also a lot like humans that I like. It perseveres, innovates, and aims for the impossible. I mean, how can a plant jump so many steps in the food chain at once?!!! It evolved to catch insects to survive because of the poor soil in the bogs where it lives.

I also like that (ironically) Venus flytrap uses the materials it gets from insects to prey on them. It emits ultraviolet light which gets their attention and it uses the chemicals from the insects it digests to produce it. I did not draw it in the painting because it cannot be seen with the human eye. But I made the insects blue to remember this interesting ability. As I did this, I also drew the extinct Xerces blue butterfly. This is to remind myself that it is not enough to be innovative and persevere. A lot of responsibility comes from jumping many steps in the food chain, like humans also have done. I want to help to create more protected areas for plants and animals to live in, on land and in the oceans. It is our responsibility, because we are the ultimate apex predator that also has enough brains to protect other species. (It is quite lucky for us that Venus flytraps did not evolve to have a large brain, don’t you think?) 

WETA-PBS Kids Writing Contest 2021 (Jonathan: First place)

The task was to write a picture book that started with “I cannot wait for when…”. So I wrote about a good virus that can fight bad viruses. When the pandemic started and there were no vaccines yet, I was thinking about many ways how to protect people from it. The vaccines inject dead virus cells so that the immune system can make antibodies quickly if the real viruses come. Without vaccines, I thought you could take antibodies from people who survived the virus and give them to the other people. In this book, I wrote about a third way: you can use special viruses called virophages which are like parasites on the big macro viruses, to defeat COVID. Unfortunately, only 3 virophages were found in nature so far, but scientists are creating more of them. At the start of the book, the virophage is bullied by bacteriophages. These are also good viruses, but they kill bacteria. They can even fight superbugs!

You can also find this book on the books page on this blog.

Code VA Computer Science in Your Neighborhood 2020 (Jonathan: winner)

[Video coming soon]

Code VA Computer Science in Your Neighborhood 2021

[Video coming soon]