Young Inventor Honored With 'Eccentric Technology'Award
Intermediate School District Recognizes Jeffry Misner
By Paul Gingras

Jeffry Misner poses with the first Jeffry Misner Eccentric Apparatus Award at Gros Cap School Tuesday, April 8, with lead teacher Monica Silet (left) and his mother, Dana Misner. The Intermediate School District honored Mr. Misner at an assembly that day for creating interesting devices in support of his science fair projects over the years. The award bearing his name will be given each year by the Eastern Upper Peninsula Intermediate School District, at its regional science fair.

Every year, a handful of student science projects impress parents and teachers with unexpected ingenuity at the Eastern Upper Peninsula student science fair. In recent years, many have been made by Jeffry Misner of Gros Cap School, who was honored with his own experimentation award Tuesday, April 8, from the Intermediate School District (ISD). He received his award before the school's student body from Michelle Ribant, curriculum coordinator for the ISD.

From this year forward, the Jeffry Misner award will be presented at the ISD's kindergarten-througheighth grade science fair, Ms. Ribant said. In addition to a certificate, winners will receive a $50 savings bond.

This year's eighth graders are competitive, surpassing their peers in recent years in the complexity of their experiments, raising the bar at the science fair, Ms. Ribant said.

Mr. Misner's device this year, an electrokinetic lifter, was a small angular contraption of balsa wood, tin foil, and wire, powered by electricity to produce ionic wind (a force not completely understood by scientists), which lifted the device off the ground, where it floated and dashed about in the air before he cut the power.

"The research that went into this was phenomenal," Ms. Ribant said. "We couldn't let Jeffry go on to high school without some distinction."

"We are very proud of him," said his mother, Dana Misner, who admitted her son's contraptions, and his explanations of science, frequently surpass her own scientific understanding.

Judges at regionals always ask about Mr. Misner's participation because they know that, if he makes it to regionals, they will be in for something exceptionally interesting, Ms. Ribant added.

While many students understand science and create good projects, not all can communicate their understanding as well as Mr. Misner, Ms. Ribant said, whose devices are exceptional even when they don't meet the standard science fair criteria.

Ms. Ribant is hoping Mr. Misner himself will present the award until he is graduated from high school.

For a science fair project to receive an award, it must include all components of the scientific process such as posing a problem, proving something, and including a control group.

"Jeffry just wants to create the thing," Ms. Ribant said. His project "was more of an engineering feat than an experiment."

The Jeffry Misner Eccentric Apparatus Award is an acknowledgment for students who make an exceptional apparatus in support of a science fair project, she added.

Mr. Misner's electrokinetic lifter was powered by a computer monitor. Rather than producing a picture, he rigged it to pour 30,000 volts into the tiny contraption, resulting in wires with a strong positive charge, tin foil with a negative charge, and a cloud of electrons. The negatively charged foil pulled up toward the wire, and lifted

the entire device from the table. Creation "is always out of curiosity," Mr. Misner said. "I'm not satisfied with not knowing how things work."

To learn how things function for himself, Mr. Misner has been taking apart all manner of contraptions since he was very young. A fan of science fiction, he tests ideas he sees on MythBusters, a television series that tests sometimes outlandish scientific proposals.

The ionic wind contraption did not work on MythBusters, but "it worked for me," he said.

Being a scientist is definitely the future Mr. Misner envisions for himself, and rocketry or entomology (the study of insects) are strong possibilities.

He admits that his wide range of scientific curiosity makes choosing an area of focus difficult.

"Everything interests me," he said.