Leigh High School took seven grand prizes and other awards, including almost 70 individual student awards. In addition, the school itself earned two grand prize awards, and Lewis Smith was given an outstanding teacher honor. Two Los Gatos High School students earned titles as grand prize alternates, and the school took four student awards. St. Mary's School also did well in its middle school category, taking 16 student honors.

Grand prize winner Daniel Kluesing, from Leigh, will travel to Cleveland next month for the International Science and Engineering Fair; grand prize alternates Daniel Zimardi and Ryan Terrill, both from Los Gatos High, and Amit Vainsencher, from Leigh, will go to the California State Science Fair in Los Angeles in late May.

Award winners were announced at a large ceremony March 30. Leigh was named an outstanding school as well as earning $1,000 for having one of the three best physical science projects at the event.

"Leigh has been the outstanding school five years in a row," Smith said. Smith started pushing the science fair in 1992, when "it looked to me like it was a valuable experience," he said. "It's exciting, it's gratifying because you get to see the quality of the work that the students are producing."

While students practice science in school, it's not always a true scientific process and it usually has "canned solutions." By doing projects for the science fair, students come up with "a product that they originated—there is no canned answer," Smith said. Some projects even have no result but are given awards because the student had a good hypothesis and a good project.

"It's really a lot of fun. I feel really energized by it, and it's nice to feel appreciated," said Smith, who has earned the outstanding teacher title five years in a row. Smith received $1,000 in cash and a plaque as the outstanding teacher.

Los Gatos High received a $50 cash award by Trimble Navigation Ltd., and St. Mary's received $50 from the Polish-American Engineers' Club.

Local entries in the fair had titles such as Vainsencher's "Pattern Recognition Capabilities of Neural Networks," Terrill's "Potential Effects of Conversion of Salt Ponds to Tidal Wetlands on Migratory Shorebirds" and Zimardi's "Optical Correlation of Digital Date Using Volume Holograms: The Impact of the Photodetector."

St. Mary's students were no less creative and intellectual, with project names by groups of students that included "Are We Killing Our Creeks?" by Chris Lombardi and Brian Stephan; "Magic of Magnets" by Jack Robson; and "What Effect Does Water Have on Sound?" by Megan MacDonell, Katie McGrath and Alyssa Micciche. St. Mary's was given awards ranging from cash to certificates of achievement to plaques to tours of NASA.

A complete list of 2003 winners and awards is available at www.science-fair.org.