Spillane MS 7th Grader Wins First Place in Local Science & Engineering Fair
Spillane Middle School seventh grade student Shri Chada won first place for her project titled “Understanding Public Perceptions During the Pandemic Using Sentiment Analysis on COVID-19 Related Tweets” at the 63rd Annual Science and Engineering Fair of Houston, held Feb. 25-26 at the George R. Brown Convention Center.
The fair featured more than 700 students from approximately 100 schools across Southeast Texas. Chada won first in the Robotics and Intelligent Machines category.
Chada got the idea for her project after listening to a program on National Public Radio (NPR) highlighting the national decline in teenagers’ mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Chada used sentiment analysis, an evolving research approach that helps identifies the emotional tone behind a body of text, to gather her own information about how teenagers felt since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There has been an increase in mental health issues since the COVID-19 pandemic began,” Chada said. “Social media has been increasingly used to express and share feelings, and I was wondering if there was a way to mine that information to understand the change in public mood. After doing some background research, I saw that other researchers have tried to use sentiment analysis on tweets for other topics. I wanted to see if I could apply that approach to pandemic tweet data and understand if the sentiment is positive, negative or neutral and how it is changing over time.”
Chada’s research showed that there was an initial positive sentiment in March 2020 and then declined until vaccines were made available to the public.
Chada also received the John M. Dilorio Foundation for Outside the Box Thinking award for her project. Representatives from the foundation presented Chada with her award at Spillane on March 30.
Chada presented her project at the Texas Science and Engineering Fair on March 26 at Texas A&M University and is also nominated to enter the Broadcom MASTERS, the nation’s premier middle school STEM competition.
“Working on this project and interacting with the audience and judges is very educational and motivating,” Chada said. “Working on a hands-on project like this has helped my problem-solving and programming skills tremendously and I hope to continue building on these skills in the future.”
Source: Cypress-Fairbanks ISD
