AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

With Ar­mani Adams’ pas­sion for sci­ence and school pride, he is hop­ing to be vic­to­ri­ous in this year’s Break­through Ju­nior Chal­lenge com­pe­ti­tion.

The an­nu­al com­pe­ti­tion is for stu­dents to get cre­ative about shar­ing and ed­u­cat­ing oth­ers on math­e­mat­i­cal/sci­en­tif­ic con­cepts about which they are pas­sion­ate.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia, the Queen’s Roy­al Col­lege stu­dent en­thu­si­as­ti­cal­ly ex­plained why he want­ed to dis­cuss the the­o­ry be­hind light.

“When you learn about the elec­tro­mag­net­ic spec­trum, you re­al­ize that light isn't what you see. It's a whole range of fre­quen­cies and dif­fer­ent types that we can't see with our eyes, but we still use every day… A pack­et of en­er­gy called a pho­ton... And it's al­so an elec­tro­mag­net­ic wave mov­ing at the speed of light. Noth­ing in this uni­verse trav­els faster than light and pho­tons. So, I found it re­al­ly cool to share with the rest of the world,” Adams’ said.

Adams is cur­rent­ly in Form 6 and shared that he had to bal­ance his aca­d­e­m­ic ex­am­i­na­tion sched­ule in or­der to find time for him to script, film and ed­it his video sub­mis­sion.

A screenshot of Armani Adams' video submission to the global science communication competition "Breakthrough Junior Challenge", in which he discusses the Theory of Light. [Image courtesy Armani Adams]

The glob­al com­pe­ti­tion is struc­tured so that there are var­i­ous win­ners in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories.  Adams is hop­ing to be suc­cess­ful and grab the grand prize. Adams is the on­ly Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­al in the se­mi-fi­nals.

“It is split up in­to dif­fer­ent re­gions. They split up the top 30 out of every­body and they're the fi­nal­ists. And the top 30, they go on­to the pop­u­lar vote,” he said.

While Adams is hop­ing to be the win­ner of a $250,000 col­lege schol­ar­ship and a state-of-the-art sci­ence lab for his school, he is more con­cerned about win­ning $50,000 in prize mon­ey for this Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Stud­ies teacher, Miss Forbes.

“This is just not a sci­ence com­pe­ti­tion, it's a sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pe­ti­tion. I used a lot of things I learnt from her in my video, in com­ing up with my video. I col­lab­o­rat­ed with her on the video; she re­al­ly sup­port­ed me, you know,” Adams said.

De­sirous of win­ning, he said his Port-of-Spain sec­ondary school has taught him that no mat­ter the out­come, he is loved and spe­cial.

“Even if like, you know, there is prob­a­bly a 100 per cent guar­an­tee of fail­ure… as long as you prob­a­bly step foot in there and give it your all… The prize may not be for you but it's the ef­fort that counts and that's what they teach us here at QRC,” he shared.

To vote for Adams, like and share his sub­mis­sion video by vis­it­ing the Break­through Ju­nior Chal­lenge Face­book page and Youtube chan­nel.