After about four weeks of coding a website and gathering data, junior Leo Liao is currently participating in the annual LA County Science Fair from May 3 to May 27, 2024.
Liao’s product for the fair will be a research paper analyzing how gaming affects reaction time. So far, Liao has coded a website that directs the user to play at least an hour of games before testing their reaction time speed and entering the information in a Google Form survey.
“Participation [in the fair] is important because the steps of creating this project can be important for my future,” Liao said. “Spending so much time coding the website and researching the factors of reaction time speed could help me develop research and coding skills that are useful later in college.”
Liao will soon start analyzing the data to write his research paper.
“I really liked this project because it’s related to my interests, which are video games and computer science. When I heard that video games improve your reaction speed, I decided to create an experiment and find out,” Liao said. “One thing I don’t like is the tool I used to collect data as the reaction time game could contain a lot of bias that could skew the result.”
As well as gaining future life skills such as coding and research skills, Liao also hopes the project will stand out to colleges and demonstrate his interests.
“I plan on majoring in computer science in the future so I think doing this science fair will really show my interest in computer science,” Liao said. “I think winning an award is also important to show colleges that I’m interested in computer science.”
Though gathering data has been a slow process, Liao has made small wins such as coming up with the topic and being able to operate the experiment in school which keeps him motivated.
“My favorite part about this project is just the liberty of being able to create my own website,” Liao said. “I did some research and utilized many programming languages for the website and the game. It’s been a great way of taking risks and learning from them which we would normally not be able to do in school.”
