20 year old Melvin Zammit, a third year Electrical engineering student, took part and placed first in the NSTF contest for Young Scientists in 2011, with his project called the three dimensional display, in which he developed a 3D 'hologram' screen.

“It was a great experience, however more than that it opened many doors for me. Following the contest, I had the opportunity to take part in a European contest in Helsinki and won a special award. I then headed to ISEF, the International Science and Engineering Fair”.

Melvin discovered the NSTF competition through an outreach programme, where they went to his secondary school and spoke about the competition.

 “I took part in four contests in total, adding on a bit to the project each time”.

“The EU contest for young scientists was very social and gave us a chance to interact with students from other countries. I then ran into some of them at other science fairs and I’ve kept in contact with them. It’s interesting to see how far they’ve come and the sort of projects they are creating now. Melvin, on his part, has taken quite a liking to android and has created a number of Apps, some of which have seen thousands of downloads”.

He later attended the international Google Science Fair, where around 10,000 competitors took part. These were then reduced to 90 and then the top 15 were chosen. “This is one of my most memorable experiences. We met some of the top brains within the technology sector, such as the CEO of Google, one of the fathers of the internet Vince Cerf and past winners. These were our judges. It was a very interesting experience”.

Melvin found was listening to a broadcast over the internet when his name was announced as a finalist. ”Their accent is quite strange whenever they try and pronounce Maltese names so I was asking myself, is it me or someone else’? I was at home at the time and I remember my mother picking up the phone and telling everyone. Facebook and news articles at the time saw many likes on Facebook which gave me a lot of support.”

Melvin discovered his love of science through his father. “I cannot remember a time when science did not fascinate me. I used to build my own circuits”.

He first took part in NSTF competitions through the young scientist competition when he was in secondary school, where he, along with three or four of his classmates built a solar water heater.

Many people have ideas, however do not actually go through with them. My advice to these people is go for it. If you have an idea go through with it don’t wait. If you wait you will never get around to it.

Several teams from Newark school will be taking part in this year’s NSTF School Contest for Young Scientists. Mr Jean Pierre Brincat, their science teacher, explained that teams from difference schools will take their projects to the contest that will be held in MCAST. Top students will then have the opportunity to take part in a European competition. He stressed that most students came up with their projects themselves.

“Students learn about the type of science that interests them, so if a student is interested in video games, they would be more interested in class if the class is about video games. They also learn about the scientific process. There have been a number of projects where students have had to begin anew, and this is an important part of science”.

The Newark students, most of whom are from the international community, expressed their excitement about the competition.

Aside from the School Contest from Young Scientists, NSTF also hosts a Primary School Contest for Young Scientists, and De La Salle, last year’s winners, will again take part.

Ms. Charmaine Suleiman, their science teacher, said that this year the team will be testing a variety of soft drinks in order to test their sugar density when compared to still water.

“Last year was the first time we took part in this competition and the children learnt a lot while having fun. As for my expectations, I believe children gain confidence through such competitions, they get to speak in public and gain hands-on experience, which is a very important part of science”.