Students Experiment at Psychology Fair 2019


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Every year, Helix Psychology Teacher, Julie Damschen and her class put on a Psych Fair showcasing a favorite type of experiment. The fair was first created in 2004 and is aimed at freshman in order to recruit them for the next year as well as to get them interested in why their brain works a certain way.

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior, and Mrs. Damschen loves to teach her students and inform them of their growing brain and habits. The Psychology Fair is perfect because “Psychology is best described when its being applied,” according to Mrs. Damschen.


Her students first pick a psychological principle, then an activity in which they can draw a hypothesis from comparing two groups.

As for Mrs. Damschen’s favorite experiment, well she doesn’t have one. But she does love distortion glasses, which impair your vision and make it almost impossible to do a simple task such as walk in a straight line or draw a smiley face. She believes psychology should be a requirement because “high school is a perfect age for students who are trying to figure who they are, their perspectives on the world and that’s exactly what psychology covers.”

Taking a walk through the fair, it was impressive to see the projects created by students and how interested the freshman where in learning about psychology principles.

My favorite experiment was Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy Experiment. It was a classical condition experiment where after continuously eating lemon, your mouth would salivate at just the mere word.

The experiment was performed by Senior Andrea Enciso, who says, “Psychology is everywhere and I want to explore what makes humans do things.”

This was the first year that the Psychology Fair had an obsessive compulsive disorder experiment which was put together by Senior Austin Goff and his partner. Due to Mrs. Damschen’s class, he now wants to enter the field of psychology in college.


If you are interested in taking Psychology, Mrs. Damschen teaches college prep psychology as well as advanced placement.