If one is a part of the Avon School District, then one knows what an amazing science department the school has and how truly talented the Avon students are in the field of science. This was recently demonstrated when four Avon High School students were selected as finalists for The National STEM Festival. Lila Vanderlei, Bree Vanderlei, Kaeli Wallinga and Maesa Kuhlman were all selected and given the opportunity to submit a video with the chance to win a trip to Washington D.C. to participate in The National STEM Festival that is to be held March 19th through the 22nd of 2025. The 2025 National STEM Festival kicked off this past August 21st with a nationwide student challenge seeking innovative solutions to global issues using STEM. STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. The National STEM Festival features over 125 exceptional student submissions. In addition to presenting their innovations to judges, the students will also participate in mentor sessions, engage in hands-on STEM activities, explore a public expo and will benefit from networking opportunities among other opportunities. Lila Vanderlei has decided to take the next step and submit a video on her STEM innovation. Lila is the daughter of Craig and Amy Vanderlei and a senior at Avon High School. This is Lila’s first year submitting a project. The title of her project is “Can Adobe Histograms Be Used to Estimate Soil Moisture”. Lila’s project focused on whether or not there was a correlation between soil moisture and histograms of images. Histograms are a type of chart that shows distributions of different frequencies. For her project, the histograms were used to show the distribution of color in the images. In order to gather data, Lila had to take soil samples from a field and add water droplets to the samples. She then took pictures of each of the samples and then dried out the soil to find the soil moisture. Lila then used a drone to take an aerial picture of the field. The Adobe program was then used to make histograms of the different pictures. In the final step of her project, she used the values from the histograms to create an Excel graph that showed the correlation between the histograms. Lila found that using histograms proved effective in soil moisture up to 30%. The global issue that Lila’s project focused on was trying to find a way to quickly predict soil moisture. As she has already submitted her project video, now it is just a waiting to game to hear is she will be selected. Lila is very excited by the potential opportunity to attend The National STEM Festival. The Avon High School students always participate in the science fair as part of their science classroom requirement. She chose to do this particular project because she thought it would be fun to be able to use a drone as well as she was interested to see if there was a correlation between the amount of moisture in the soil and the image colors. This project has a personal connection to Lila as she has grown up on a farm as well as a farming community where soil moisture is an important part of people’s lives and livelihood. After graduation, Lila plans to go into science education as she has always enjoyed the science classes that the Avon School District has offered.