MANILA, Philippines - The Quezon City government’s big investment in education is now producing more encouraging results.
This could be gleaned from the fact that QC public schools have become training grounds for bright students participating in international competitions. Many of them usually come home with the bacon, so to speak. Take the case of two QC students who won in international competitions held in George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, Texas April 14-19. Ryan Ramirez of Quezon City High School and Yomkippur Perez of Batasan National High School bagged the silver and bronze medal, respectively, in the International Sustainable World Energy Engineering and Environment Project (I-SWEEEP) Olympiad for 2010.
“We are proud of them. It only shows that the city’s prioritization of education has come a long way. We must continue to improve the quality of education to produce students like them,” Mayor Feliciano Belmonte Jr. said.
Ramirez earned the silver medal in Senior Energy category for his project titled “Developing bacterium-fermented banana (Musa Spientum) peelings on wastewater environment as a substrate for dual-chamber microbial fuel cell” and Perez, the bronze in Senior Environment category for his project titled “Utilization of chicken eggshell as an absorbent material of biological origin for the removal of lead ions in aqueous solution.”
I-SWEEEP, which is the largest science fair open to middle and high school students worldwide and organized by the Cosmos Foundation, a non-profit organization, is intended to spark interest and awareness about the planet’s sustainability challenges, and to help find solutions to the pressing challenges in the fields of energy, engineering and environment.
A total of 1,000 brightest science-like-minded students and their supervisors from 70 countries and 43 US states had joined the competition and displayed their 470 science projects.