Iowa State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has presented 10 “Future Discovery Awards” to 4-H participants at the 2015 Iowa State Fair.
Cole Pontier, 11, of Osceola was one of the recipients for his exhibit, “Twitter Coffee Pot,” in which he created a component that started a coffee pot when it detects a tweet on Twitter.
The Future Discovery Award is a $500 scholarship, which will be given to each student upon enrolling at ISU and pursuing a Liberal Arts and Sciences major.
The scholarship was presented to 4-H participants whose Iowa State Fair exhibits exemplified “innovation, curiosity, and scholarship foundational to a liberal arts and sciences education.” Winning entries ranged from a wind turbine blade experiment to a Twitter-enabled coffee pot.
“We looked for blue ribbon 4-H projects that exemplified the values inherent in a liberal arts education,” said Dan Rice, the college’s Director of Recruiting and a judge. “In addition, quality and creativity in presentation were evaluated.”
The projects selected represent the five “academic interest areas” that make up the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences: Humanities, communications, mathematics and computational sciences, natural sciences, and social sciences.
Nearly 3,000 participants presented exhibits, which were first reviewed by 4-H judges. Afterward, liberal arts and sciences staff selected 10 award recipients from about 1,500 blue ribbon-holding exhibits.
“Judging was no easy task,” Rice said. “But it is fantastically rewarding to see the wealth of talent, knowledge, and potential we have from all ages and corners of the state. These participants show strong intellectual promise, and we are pleased to present them with a Future Discovery Award.”
“We wish we could award hundreds of these awards to recognize all the creativity and inventiveness that we saw in the 4-H exhibits at the Iowa State Fair,” said Beate Schmittmann, college dean. “We hope to welcome the winners as new students in our college in a few years.”