Editor's note: We're celebrating this year's impressive 20 Google Science Fair finalist projects over 20 days in our Spotlight on a Young Scientist series. Learn more about each of these inspiring young people and hear what inspires them in their own words.

Name: Lalita Prasida Sripada Srisai

Home: Odisha, India

Age Category: 13-15

Project title: Absorbing water pollutants with corn cobs






Lalita was inspired to find a use for corn cobs, unused agricultural waste, during a conversation with a tribal farmer in a nearby village. Considering the prominence of water pollution in her country, she decided to use the cobs to improve water quality and ultimately provide access to healthier drinking water. She tested several different methods and found that corn cobs can absorb chemicals, detergents and other pollutants directly from the water. Lalita’s project goal is to provide more clean water for nearby villages. 

What was the inspiration behind your project? 

When I was in nursery school, I dressed up as a corn cob and won the prize for the Fancy Dress Competition. Since then, corn has been one of my favourite vegetables. I love roasted, grilled or steamed corn ears, and roasted corn on the cobs is a popular street food in India. Interestingly, all the parts of the corn plant except the actual cobs are useful. I’ve wondered for a long time how to make use of corn cobs. One day I made a hole at the centre of a cob using a screwdriver. Then I poured some dirty water inside the hole and collected the extract from the other end. Surprisingly, the collected extract was devoid of all the suspended particles. This inspired me to search, examine and experiment whether we could clean wastewater by using corn cobs. This could reduce waste by using another form of waste. Luckily, I was supported by my mentor to plan the project in detail and encouraged to participate in this year's Google Science Fair.

Lalita's interest in corn started from an early age

When and why did you become interested in science? 

I am the privileged eldest daughter of my father, who’s a science teacher. Very often he used to take me to the chemistry lab so that I could perform experiments with his students. My frequent visits to the lab packed with variously coloured chemicals attracted my attention since childhood. In my home, I learned how to get around the kitchen from my mother. To me, mixing, soaking, roasting, grinding and baking different ingredients of right proportion to get maximum taste, flavour, energy and above all satisfaction is based more on science than art. Both of my parents ignited my interest in science from a young age.

What words of advice would you share with other young scientists? 

Always observe your surroundings keenly. You never know what scientific breakthrough you may stumble upon.

Posted by Ritcha Ranjan, Product Manager

School’s in! As you settle into your classes and start to juggle soccer practice, club meetings and homework, we’re here to help. We’ve been spending the summer “break” creating new tools to help you save time, collaborate with classmates and create your best work—all for free.

Schoolwork, minus the work 

Writing papers is now a lot easier with the Research tool in Docs for Android. You can search Google without leaving Docs, and once you find the quotes, facts or images you’re looking for, you can add them to your document with just a couple taps. That means less time switching between apps, and more time perfecting your thesis statement.

 

With Voice typing, you can record ideas or even compose an entire essay without touching your keyboard. To get started, activate Voice typing in the Tools menu when you're using Docs in Chrome. Then, when you’re on the go, just tap the microphone button on your phone’s keyboard and speak your mind. Voice typing is available in more than 40 languages, so we can help with your French homework, too. Voilà!

Do more, together
We’ve made it easier for you to tell what was added or deleted in Docs—and who made the changes. Now when you’ve left a document and you come back to it later, you can just click “See new changes” to pick up right where your classmates left off.

Forms helps you get a lot of information easily and in one place—so when you want to vote on your class field trip or collect T-shirt sizes for your team, you don’t have to sort through dozens of emails. With the new Forms, you can survey with style—choose one of the colorful new themes or customize your form with your own photo or logo, and we’ll choose the right color palette to match. Easily insert images, GIFs or videos and pick from a selection of question formats. Then send out your survey and watch as the responses roll in!

Your best work, your best you 
Creating presentations, crafting newsletters and managing your team’s budget is hard enough without having to worry about making everything look good. With the new collection of templates in Docs, Sheets and Slides, you can focus on your content while we make sure it gets the expert polish it deserves. Choose from a wide variety of reports, portfolios, resumes and other pre-made templates designed to make your work that much better, and your life that much easier.

With Explore in Sheets, you can now spend less time trying to decipher your data, and more time making a point. Explore creates charts and insights automatically, so you can visualize trends and understand your data in seconds on the web or on your Android. It’s like having an expert analyst right by your side.

 

Mission control, for teachers and students

A year ago, we launched Classroom to save teachers and students time and make it easier to keep classwork organized. Today we’re launching a Share to Classroom Chrome extension to make it easy for teachers to share a website with the entire class at the same time—no matter what kind of laptop students have. Now the whole class can head to a web page together, without losing precious minutes and focus to typos.

 

Rock this school year with Google Docs and Classroom. Your first assignment? Try these new features, which are rolling out today.

Posted by Catherine Davis, former 4th grade teacher and Director of Academic Technology at Pilgrim School 

Editor's note:Today we’re launching a new Chrome extension, Share to Classroom, which solves a big pain point for teachers: getting all students to the same website during class. The Share to Classroom extension works on any laptop, including Chromebooks, Macs and PCs. Catherine Davis, former 4th grade teacher and Director of Academic Technology at Pilgrim School, piloted the Classroom extension with Mrs. Shorkey’s 3rd grade class, and here she describes her experience using this new extension and the impact on her students.


Sharing a website with my students is a great way to get them engaged. When we studied South America, I shared a video of Tierra del Fuego, and my students were able to view the coast, hear the wind and see the waves soar. But getting a class full of 4th graders on the same web page is a huge challenge. I typically write the URL on the board, then walk around to help each student who misses a capital or underscore or backslash. My students get frustrated, I get frustrated, and before I know it 10 minutes of precious teaching time is lost.

So I was thrilled to pilot the Share to Classroom extension. With the extension I can open a website and “push” it to my Google Classroom students, so the page opens immediately on all their devices. Our 3rd graders gasped when we tried it – the webpage instantaneously popped up on all of their screens.

The new extension lets me engage my students and help them drive their own learning on 1:1 devices at our school. When our 3rd graders were studying Native American culture, I pushed a website to the class so they could research traditional clothing and food. The students aren’t locked to the page I send, and one student navigated from there to an even better site. With the Classroom extension, the student was able to push the new site to me, and I reviewed and pushed to the entire class. She had a boost of confidence when her discovery drove class discussion.

Using the extension also lets me think on my feet. When discussing pioneers, a brave student raised his hand and asked “What’s a stage coach?” I realized my students hadn’t been exposed to the term. I immediately pulled up a definition and video and pushed it to the class. I also saved the webpage as a draft to post to my other Classroom students later. I could have projected on a screen, but the intimacy of having the webpage on each device allows students to explore on their own, hear clearly and watch repeatedly. It also levels the playing field for ELL and students of different backgrounds so everyone starts literally on the same page.

As teachers, we never feel we have enough time to do everything we want with our students. The new Share to Classroom extension gives us back those few minutes it takes to get students to the same place and makes learning about investigating, not about navigating.

*Note: Google Apps admins can install the extension for their entire domain so that it’s easiest for teachers and students to get started. Teachers and students both need the extension in order to push web pages to each other.

Editor's note: We're celebrating this year's impressive 20 Google Science Fair finalist projects over 20 days in our Spotlight on a Young Scientist series. Learn more about each of these inspiring young people and hear what inspires them in their own words.

Name: Anika Cheerla

Home:  California, USA

Age Category: 13-15

Project title: Automated and accurate early-diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease



While volunteering in a senior care facility, Anika was shocked to learn how many older adults suffer from Alzheimer's disease. Her curiosity led her to learn more about diagnosis of this disease, and she found that without a standard test or method for diagnosis, most doctors rely on their own opinions. She decided to create a tool that quickly and accurately diagnosed Alzheimer's and knew her brother, who loved science and coding, would be able to help her. By extracting image features from MRI scans, Anika built an interface for doctors to upload an image, enter some basic patient information and get a reliable Alzheimer's diagnosis. 

What was the inspiration behind your project? 

5.3 million Americans are currently living with Alzheimer’s. The disease has killed my great-aunt, hurting my entire family. At the senior home I volunteered at, I met the victims of this illness. With Alzheimer’s everywhere around me, I wanted to make a difference and ease the lives of patients and their loved ones. I found that the majority of patients with Alzheimer’s are not aware of their disease, and therefore don’t get the proper care or treatment. This inspired me to build a tool that gives patients an early and accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's.

I was also inspired by research carried out by other researchers as part of the SDSS Quasar Lens Search (SQLS). Using an earlier version of the data set I utilized in this project, the SQLS researchers significantly increased the number of known lensed quasars. The success of the SQLS approach inspired me to develop my own method for identifying lensed quasars.

When and why did you become interested in science? 

My brother and I were eating dinner when he asked me the question that would change my life: how does gravity work? I didn’t know the answer, so he made me run around the galaxy (our house) and find space-time (a sheet), a planet (a big ball) and two meteors (small marbles). He stretched out the sheet and balanced the two marbles on the ends of it. Then he made me put the big ball at the center of the sheet. The big ball pushed down on the sheet, and as the smaller marbles rolled down the sheet towards the big ball, I felt omniscient.

I took the materials to school the next day, and explained how gravity works to most of 4th grade. I learned two things from this: One, teaching other people, in a simple way, how complicated matters work makes me look really smart. And two, people actually feel the same wonder and amazement I feel when I learn something new.

This might have been the experience that led me to teach later on in life. This might have been the experience that led me to keep a jar of marbles on my desk. But this was, for certain, the experience that made me question anything and everything in the universe. It was as if the big ball formed an indentation in my head, making the marbles and the tissue (the neurons and the blood) stop in their tracks and start rolling down towards the answers.

What words of advice would you share with other young scientists? 

We now live in an age where the learning process takes minutes. We get easy access to research papers, free courses and a myriad of other resources. When I started this project, I had only a basic understanding of programming and no idea what neural networks were, but from learning from the hard work of other researchers and teachers, I was able to build my tool. What I took from this project, and what people should always remember is that you can stand on the shoulders of giants when you want to touch the stars.

Editor's note: We're celebrating this year's impressive 20 Google Science Fair finalist projects over 20 days in our Spotlight on a Young Scientist series. Learn more about each of these inspiring young people and hear what inspires them in their own words.

Name: Pranav Sivakumar

Home: Illinois, USA

Age Category: 13-15

Project title: Automated search for gravitationally lensed quasars


Pranav’s shown interest in astronomy since looking up at the night sky at age 4. He later became interested in physics and worked in a lab focused on quasar research. Certain quasars (massive and extremely remote celestial objects, emitting exceptionally large amounts of energy ) cause an effect called gravitational lensing, which magnifies the light of distant galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to see. Compiling existing data from over 450,000 quasars, Pranav developed two algorithms to automatically find gravitationally lensed quasars and improve the accuracy and reliability of candidates identified for follow-up observations. Pranav’s most excited that his project and results might confirm the expansion of the universe, helping us determine our eventual fate. 

What was the inspiration behind your project? 

When I attended lectures at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, I repeatedly heard the phrases “dark matter,” “dark energy” and “future of the universe.” Curious by nature, I asked questions about these topics and eventually learned that very little is known about these two phenomena; in fact, the term “dark” literally describes our limited knowledge of them. I learned that gravitational lensing, which is caused by massive astronomical objects bending light and which results in multiple images of an astronomical light source, is an effective way to study these constituents of the universe. In particular, studying gravitational lensing of quasars, some of the brightest and most distant objects in the universe, may hold the key to understanding our future.

I was also inspired by research carried out by other researchers as part of the SDSS Quasar Lens Search (SQLS). Using an earlier version of the data set I utilized in this project, the SQLS researchers significantly increased the number of known lensed quasars. The success of the SQLS approach inspired me to develop my own method for identifying lensed quasars.

When and why did you become interested in science? 

In the age of the Internet, it’s perhaps ironic that my interest in science started with a book. At the age of seven, I found a book called “Great Physicists” in my house; I picked up the book and found it fascinating.

As my interest in physics grew, I began reading books more focused on astrophysics and cosmology by Michio Kaku. When you see a book at the library titled “Physics of the Impossible,” it’s difficult to ignore!

The lectures at Fermilab were formative in crystallizing my interest in science. Though I understood only one or two words of the science being discussed in the talks, what stayed with me was the energy and excitement of scientists challenging each other in the room.

Science feeds my curiosity by allowing me to ask complex questions, challenge assumptions and explore interesting topics without worrying about assignments or tests. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle; there’s a great amount of satisfaction when the pieces start fitting together.

The “Aha” moment is priceless – just ask Archimedes!

What words of advice would you share with other young scientists? 

I learned from experience that starting small and building up to complex questions works best for young scientists. Feel confident about connecting with professionals – initially, it may be scary, but their willingness to help and their mentorship are worth much more than those few moments of anxiety.

When I ran into a technical roadblock, I contacted the primary researcher on the SQLS team in Japan; within 24 hours, he responded with valuable suggestions that I’m still pursuing to this day.

Editor's note: We're celebrating this year's impressive 20 Google Science Fair finalist projects over 20 days in our Spotlight on a Young Scientist series. Learn more about each of these inspiring young people and hear what inspires them in their own words.

Name: Alexey Tarasov (Алексей Тарасов)

Home: Moscow, Russia

Age Category: 13-15

Project title: Using ternary logic on current electronics








Alexey had always been a computer science fan, but it was fixing a computer that really sparked his curiosity. He wondered why all modern day computers ran on binary logic, and if there might be a benefit to using ternary logic. Once he found out that a vintage USSR computer did, in fact, rely on ternary logic, he knew he wanted to test this logic on current electronics. Alexey’s model successfully used ternary logic, and he’s excited to create new ternary logic elements for integrated circuits and computer systems. 

What was the inspiration behind your project? 

I was inspired by the old Soviet project called "Setun."

When and why did you become interested in science? 

All my life I was interested in engineering. I was very interested in the structure of different devices and desired to create. This is what pushed me to study technologies.

What words of advice would you share with other young scientists? 

It's not enough to just discover something new. You need to make it useful for mankind. Good luck!

Editor's note: We're celebrating this year's impressive 20 Google Science Fair finalist projects over 20 days in our Spotlight on a Young Scientist series. Learn more about each of these inspiring young people and hear what inspires them in their own words.

Name: Eliott Sarrey

Home: Lorraine, France

Age Category: 13-15

Project: Bot2Karot: gardening through a smartphone-activated robot





Eliott loved the idea of gardens, but not the time commitment needed to tend them. He wondered whether he could apply his knowledge and passion for video games and video programming towards growing vegetables. With help from his father, he built a rolling robot controlled by a smartphone app he created. Since the manufactured Bot2Karot can use its manufactured arms and tool holders to hoe, water and transplant, Elliot’s extremely excited about the possibilities with his own robot. He believes he can broaden his initial aim to help people with limited mobility and access. 


What was the inspiration behind your project?

People I know spend a lot of time on gardening simulators (games). On the other hand, my family’s actual garden requires a lot of real work and attention. After careful observation, I wondered whether I could mix the idea of the gardening game with the fun of having real vegetables to eat. What if we could create a robot to take on cumbersome gardening tasks using our smartphones, so that gardening becomes a smartphone game?

When and why did you become interested in science? 

When I was quite young, I spent a lot of time in my father’s small workshop. I also liked to play Legos, and with this experience, I could dig into subjects like mechanics and physics. Three years ago, together with friends, I created a computer science club and a robotic club at my high school. That’s where I learned how to program. At home, I created small robots and robotic arms, which became the real inspiration for my project.

What words of advice would you share with other young scientists?

First of all, be curious! That’s how you come up with ideas. Seek solutions and always ask yourself how to improve on them. Once you have found your idea, do some research, persevere, investigate other solutions and keep optimizing your solution.