| Award level | Criteria breakdown | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Bronze | The student made logical conclusions and linked them to the wider world. | From my research I can tell that water salt and sugar are the main components of oral rehydration solutions. This makes sense, as dehydration is caused when you are giving off more water than you are taking in, and so you are losing salts and sugars too. This is important as learning more about dehydration will help us treat it better. |
| Silver | The student drew logical and well-considered conclusions. They explored the implications of their work for the wider worlds, drawing on the project’s aim and wider purpose. | From these tests, we can deduce that Rope B, Polypropylene, is the most suitable for climbing. It is the strongest rope we tested as it had the highest breaking point and stretched the least – meaning that it can be used repeatedly without the ropes dimensions changing. Rope C, Polyester, would not be good for climbing as it stretched very easily when a small weight was applied. It also frayed before snapping. Rope C could still be useful for some industrial processes, as it is cheap and easy to produce, but these processes must not involve large amounts of stress Our hypothesis was incorrect as Rope A, Nylon, was the weakest of the three ropes we tested – despite it being the only rope we did not split to create a thinner sample. It would not be good for climbing or industrial uses; however, it would be suited for the production of clothes as it is very thin, lightweight and doesn’t fray easily. |
| Gold | The student drew logical and well-considered conclusions. They explored, in detail, the direct and indirect implications of their work on the wider world. They directly addressed the project’s aim and wider purpose. | The findings of the practical parts of my project validated that compound F can be synthesised relatively easily in real-life using the method above, and it isn’t just a theoretical compound I produced computationally. This means that this compound could be a drug that doesn’t cause arrhythmias when used as a cancer treatment, due to it not having dioxolane rings. Ultimately, this means that this drug could be used in cancer treatments with reduced side-effects. This could improve the quality of life for patients and reduce the risk of complications during their treatment. See the table 2 (in the background information section) for figures on the number of people in the UK who suffer from lung, prostrate, bladder, colorectal, pancreatic, gastric, breast or ovarian cancers, or soft tissue sarcoma, osteosarcoma a, hepatocellular carcinoma, leukemia or lymphomas. These are the people that may benefit from the different drugs I created computationally and the one I produced practically. My mentor will submit the new compounds to chemical databases, such as ChEMBL and PubChem, so that they can be accessed and used by others. Also, my results helped to achieve my project’s secondary aim, “to show the usefulness and viability of using compounds from chemical databases in computational modelling.” As I identified several novel compounds using computational methods and existing compounds from chemical databases I (plus others in the past) have shown that this approach is possible. What’s more, as I was able to practically produce the most easily synthesised compound, I’ve shown that the compounds produced are not theoretical only. Finally, as the compounds still have structures responsible for treating cancer, but without dioxolane rings, the impact of my compound as a treatment is potentially very large. Hopefully, others will see the usefulness of employing silico techniques in early stages of drug discovery, as it is low cost and high impact. What’s more, as public chemical databases are continually growing, the number of compounds, and the data on them, is huge and easily accessed. |