It was a proud moment for staff, students and their families when six students from Sapphire Coast Anglican College received accolades in the 2023 Young Scientist Award competition. Of the six students, four received distinction certificates for their projects, with two students being invited to the NSW Young Scientist Grand awards ceremony held at University of Technology in Sydney on Monday November 27. At the ceremony Year 5 student Benjamin Oates and Year 7 student Xavier Louie were presented with grand awards with Benjamin bringing home the NSW primary rural young Scientist of the year award. "I was really excited, I'm probably going to do it again next year too," Benjamin said. The achievement marks the college's second year in a row of winning the rural primary young Scientist of the year, with Xavier Louie winning it last year for his project titled "Roll Ball Roll". This year's winning project was titled 'Take the pressure down' wherein Benjamin examined how to vary the tire pressure on a hard tail bike to mimic the suspension on a dual suspension bike. Benjamin said his love of mountain bike riding had been the source of inspiration behind this project. "We started at the end of term one, at first we just had to do some background research and I couldn't find a single thing on my project," he said. "For my method I started building a jump, but I had to have it so that when I rolled down the hill I got the exact same speed and the exact same height so it would be fair testing." Benjamin explained that he did the jump five times, recording with an accelerometer on his dual suspension bike to get an average. "I was going down in PSI increments which is what tire pressure is measured in and so I went down in PSI each time starting at 24 and going down to eight to see which would absorb the most force," he said. Benjamin said he found that 10 PSI had performed the best in his experiment, which had been an observation he hadn't expected. Benjamin also won equal first in the year 5-6 science category and second place in the Australian Institute of Physics NSW sponsorship award for his project. The second student to win a grand award was Xavier who scored second place in the Earth and Environmental Science Year 7 to 8 category for his investigation titled 'Is your house on the dark side?'. Xavier said he found some interesting discoveries during the experimentation phase of his own project wherein he examined if Black roofs affected surrounding surface temperatures. "I predicted that the black roof would reflect and send out more heat to surrounding areas but my hypotheses was wrong and what it actually did was heat itself up more than other stuff around it, so it was giving all the heat to itself," he said. Xavier said he was passionate about physics which had been the driving force behind his projects over the last two years. "I like the way things move and how they react to other movements, like last year's project, I rolled a hockey ball along different surfaces to see which surface would be better suited for people when they play, " he said. Both students said they were looking forward to next year's competition already with ideas in mind and enthusiasm to see where their next projects take them.