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Inuvik student brings home bronze from science fair

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Tyra Cockney-Goose poses with her bronze medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa in 2018. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Parrott

Tyra Cockney-Goose brought home a bronze medal from the Canada-Wide Science Fair for her project on sleep deprivation May 18 – the only medal brought home to the NWT this year, and the first in the Beaufort Delta in five years.

Tyra Cockney-Goose poses with her bronze medal at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa.
Photo courtesy of Jennifer Parrott

The Grade 12 student at East Three Secondary school said she was inspired to study the effects of sleep deprivation because, as a high school student, she is regularly sleep-deprived as are many of her peers.

"I'm a person who is very regularly sleep-deprived. I have a lot of regular first-hand effects of sleep deprivation because I'm a high school student – there's a lot of homework, and I like to procrastinate," said Cockney-Goose. "So the days before deadlines, there are a lot of late nights staying awake doing projects and homework."

Cockney-Goose said she completed the entire study on herself by staying up until different times on different nights, and then testing her hand-eye coordination, reaction time, ability to think clearly and ability to form short-term memory the following day.

"I found that the less sleep that I got at night, my ability to perform in the experiments would drastically decrease," said Cockney-Goose.

"I feel like now I'm more self-aware of getting more sleep at night. I've been taking the steps to do that, like powering down my phone, things like that," she said. "I think about how if I want to do well on my test, I should probably go to bed earlier tonight."

Her best advice for those who are looking to get a better sleep is to make sure you turn off your phone an hour before you want to go to sleep.

Coach Jennifer Parrott said she is very proud.

"I thought the kids did a wonderful job, I always enjoy going to the event myself and I was really, really, really proud of Tyra for winning," said Parrott. "She put in a lot of work and it was really wonderful to (see) all of her efforts be rewarded."

Parrott, who has been volunteering with Youth Science Canada for 10 years, added that the national science fair is a good experience for all youth.

"I think that the Canada-Wide Science Fair is a tremendous experience for any youth throughout Canada to be exposed to STEM programming," she said. "I think the fair exposes students to sciences and allows them to have a week full of educationally-enriched content and hopefully provides them with a passion to move forward in this type of field."

Kaylin Harder, a Grade 9 student from Inuvik, also attended the Canada-Wide Science Fair and won a scholarship to participate in the month-long SHAD program this summer.