TWO Good Shepherd College Year 10 students, Tanika Francis and Grace Lane-Bland, were selected as finalists and attended the 2023 Peter Doherty Science Awards in Ballarat late last month.

The Peter Doherty Science Awards recognise novel and creative research into solving everyday issues by students in the Ballarat region - the awards are supported by the Committee for Ballarat and Ballarat Tech School.

The students received the Highly Commended Award, winning $450 combined and gaining a Bronze CREST – run by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Their project, which was an investigation into substitutes for eggs in cupcakes, was intended to help people with allergies – they tested a number of pantry products and discovered that increasing the amount of milk in the recipe seemed to work well.

The challenge was to conduct a scientific investigation using household materials to find something that would help people with their cooking.

Grace said that they did a lot of research into the properties and why different binding agents work together in correlation and they used that to then form their poster and hypothesis to find out some interesting scientific knowledge.

“With that we found out that milk does work as a really good binding agent and the other binding properties such as bicarbonate soda or baking powder don’t work as well,” she said.

“It was absolutely terrifying going down to Ballarat, but it was an amazing experience and we are both very grateful for it.

“I learnt a lot more about everything and what all the other posters are about, like cleaning products, but I also saw how much effort other people are willing to put into science and just how fun it can be to do something scientific because everyone always sees it as a very boring subject, but it’s actually really fun when you know what to do and put the effort in.”

Tanika said they weren’t expecting to be nominated, but always had plans to submit the poster even when their third team member wasn’t able to be there for it.

“It was really lovely in Ballarat, the community was amazing, and we met some lovely people,” she said.

In 2022 the Ballarat Tech School formed a partnership to support Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) at Good Shepherd.