Photos courtesy of Jenny Nehring In the box office, helpers included, left to right: Loree Harvey (MVHS science fair teacher), Trinady Gonzales, Amanda Avila and Sara Nehring.

MONTE VISTA— In honor of the long, arduous hours of deep thinking, analyzing, calculating and creating by San Luis Valley students every year for their science projects, the Vali 3 Theater hosted a free showing of the 2018 documentary “Science Fair” on Thursday, Dec. 6. The showing was sponsored by the SLV Regional Science Fair.
Local high school students, parents and other folks interested in the sciences were among an audience of nearly 100 people who came to watch the documentary, which closely follows the science projects of nine gifted high school students from different parts of the world in their quest to win the 2017 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in Los Angeles.
The stakes are high.
The Intel ISEF is a science fair and the largest pre-college scientific research event in the world. Each May, more than 1500 students from virtually every corner of the globe come together to compete in the fair for college scholarships, tuition grants, internships and scientific field trips. The prizes total over $4,070,000—and at least seven ISEF alumni have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.
Monte Vista High School senior Molly Nehring has competed at Intel ISEF three years running, and she hopes to qualify for a fourth and final year before college. She and her younger sister Sara, along with Alyssa Rawinski, also from MVHS, and Elora Smith from Sargent attended the fair the same year the documentary was filmed.
Nehring’s science project that year was a computer program to simulate multi-star solar systems and the probability of planets being ejected from orbit. “It was called ‘Dancing with the Stars,’ and I basically modeled solar systems with two and three stars to see how it would affect the planet’s orbit and how the planet would survive in such a system, in terms of gravitational forces,” said Nehring.  
In previous competitions, Nehring created computer models to solve the Rubik’s Cube and use data from NASA’s space telescopes to discover new exoplanets. “Exoplanets are any planet outside of our solar system,” she said. In that project, she believes she actually discovered two unnamed planets
This year, Nehring is working on another computer model, this time of globular clusters, “which are these huge masses of hundreds of thousands to millions of stars that orbit the galaxy and are almost as old as the universe,” she said. Though the clusters have been studied extensively, there is little known about them. “I am writing the program to model the clusters so I can study them, like how the stars in them interact with each other and things like that.”  
Nehring, Rawinski and Smith were the only three students from the San Luis Valley to qualify for the 2017 competition. Nehring’s sister was selected as an eighth-grade observer due to the excellence of a cryptography program she entered in the SLV Regional Science Fair that could encrypt and decrypt codes. “The application of a program like this would be for security purposes,” said Sara, “to protect information like passwords.”
Though none of the students won physical awards at the international fair, they still came home winners. They displayed and explained their work to the judges. They met other science-minded students and listened to Nobel prize winners lecture. “We got to connect with students from all around the world,” Nehring said. “There is sort of an Olympic-ness to it. No one has any prejudices against each other and the exhibition hall is huge and there are so many projects and smart people. It’s really amazing.”
Nehring said the international science fairs have been the best experiences of her life. “We’re from a small, rural area and we don’t necessarily have the resources that some of these other students have,” she said. “Our projects are competitive but not as much as, say, someone curing cancer. Some of the projects are that advanced. For us, the award is getting there.”
Another bonus was the girls spotting themselves in the documentary. They took screen shots on their cell phones for posterity.