Weatherly Area School District had two teams win scholarships in the Pennsylvania eCybermission Competition.

The competition is web-based and open to all Pennsylvania students in grades six through nine.Teams look at problems in their respective communities and propose solutions based on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Teams must choose to use either a scientific method or an engineering design and keep meticulous records in an online folder.Weatherly's seventh-grade team is composed of Nikki Polivka, Jeremy Moser and Nicholas Berger. They elected to continue with a project they began as sixth-graders, which took top honors in the 2013 competition.Using the concept of composting, the trio experimented with decomposable material found within the district buildings, such as food scraps from the cafeteria, sawdust from shop class and shredded paper from the schools' recycling bins. The project again took first place, earning each student a $1,000 scholarship.The ninth-grade team of Chris MacNeal, Autumn Shoener, Morgan Gower and Dana Weiss tackled the problem of heavy lids on recycling bins and the difficulty in keeping them open while placing items in the bins.The students conceived the idea of using struts to keep the lids open. After creating several different prototypes, the students delved deeply into the formula needed for strut safety.Their research convinced them using any type of strut would actually be a safety hazard. The team submitted their research and findings, earning them second place in the competition and individual $500 scholarships.