Year 6 student, Alice Mou, was awarded at this year’s Young Scientist Awards for her investigation on light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. Her research was conducted with scientific rigor, earning her third place in the Australian Institute of Physics Best Physics Investigation – Primary category.
The Young Scientist Awards is an annual competition hosted by the Science Teachers Association NSW. It encourages students to undertake innovative projects and investigations to find creative solutions to real-world problems.
From Term 1 to the end of Term 3, Alice worked to find out if temperatures affect the brightness of LEDs. For her experiment, she set up LEDs and a light detecting sensor inside a cardboard box, measuring the change of its brightness through the passage of time.
Alice concluded that LEDs fade as temperature increases making the use of LEDs unsuitable for certain applications.
“Lighting in some medical, military and automotive applications require light sources to be stable at a wide range of temperatures because they will be used in different environments,” Alice explained. “LEDs are not suitable because they need to have specific temperature for it to function at optimal brightness.”
“In these areas, incandescent light bulbs or other types of lights can be used instead,” Alice suggests. “LED lights can be used when location change is not a factor, such as for surgery and military bases.”
Alice enjoyed the scientific process, and in particular when recording her results. “It was exciting to see if my hypothesis was true or not.”
