> In 2007 (my senior year), I went to two major national science fairs.
I did the science fair circuit growing up from 7th through 12th grade, then coached HS students on projects when I was in college. Today I'm a judge for ISEF, which is happening shortly.
Frankly, the whole scene is a bit done by 12th grade, so I'm not really sure this person has enough experience doing fairs to say what's broken about them and how to fix them. It's really a middle school to early high school thing; if you're starting in senior year most of the best students are already set with results they will use to apply to colleges, so they stop doing fairs in senior year. 8,9,10 is the real heat.
It's also not the common case that a student is placed in a research lab and works on in-progress research, you see all kinds of students doing varied projects. I judge the CS field and yeah you get projects which are essentially "Me and my dad built a PC" (although I've never seen a volcano project). Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel. Some of them have a giant board with binders upon binders upon binders and it's clear the kid was coached and worked at his mom's lab. The "consumer science" category of the fair grows every year.
But really no matter what, I find this to be true of all students at the fair:
> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer.
All the kids exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. Some of them are only capable of doing experiments that come in a box, but they're still curious. So I don't really know what the author is trying to say with this article. Is there actually a problem, and if so how bad is it? I'm all for changing up the science fair and evolving it and doing a new format, but I don't think they're especially lacking in innovative spirit as the author implies.
I am happy to hear that things as not as bad as I thought, but my experience being judge/mentor for a couple of years for the high school science fair near a top university was very discouraging and closer to what the author of the article describes.
Maybe the mass of the kids at the first round were what you describe, but very quickly the focus turned to the top 20% who were very much "reputation laundering" and "CV padding" internships at labs, not actual curiosity driven independent exploration
On the one hand, I understand why this can seem disheartening; we want the kids to be pure and protect them from the BS of the world. It would be great if we could just allow kids to play around with science, and there's no pressure to compete or perform.
At the same time, the reason they're doing the CV padding is because we, the adults in control of those systems they wish to gain access to (which is not the science fair), have made it so they need to pad their CV in the first place.
So as much as we want them to be purely driven by curiosity and independent exploration, our society at large does not allow for that kind of thing. Fixing those kinds of macro incentives doesn't happen by reforming the science fair.
If we want curiosity driven independent exploration for children, our society should provide that modality for adults. That we don't provide it for adults is reflected on our children; because we impose credentialism on adults, the adults understand credentialism is important to success and they impose it on their children. If adults understood that creative inquiry and independent exploration are paths to success, then more children would be encouraged to pursue that at the elite level.
> Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel.
It might be novel to the student. What I mean is that IMO, science fairs should be more about the students exploring and learning/using the scientific method, even if a similar experiment has been done thousands of times before.
An issue with that, especially now that they might go to LLMs for bibliography / exploratory work rather than google or a library, is that they may be exposed to the solution before even really tackling the problem.
Maybe that's fine, but it seems to me like it spoils the fun.
I did the science fair circuit growing up from 7th through 12th grade, then coached HS students on projects when I was in college. Today I'm a judge for ISEF, which is happening shortly.
Frankly, the whole scene is a bit done by 12th grade, so I'm not really sure this person has enough experience doing fairs to say what's broken about them and how to fix them. It's really a middle school to early high school thing; if you're starting in senior year most of the best students are already set with results they will use to apply to colleges, so they stop doing fairs in senior year. 8,9,10 is the real heat.
It's also not the common case that a student is placed in a research lab and works on in-progress research, you see all kinds of students doing varied projects. I judge the CS field and yeah you get projects which are essentially "Me and my dad built a PC" (although I've never seen a volcano project). Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel. Some of them have a giant board with binders upon binders upon binders and it's clear the kid was coached and worked at his mom's lab. The "consumer science" category of the fair grows every year.
But really no matter what, I find this to be true of all students at the fair:
> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer.
All the kids exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. Some of them are only capable of doing experiments that come in a box, but they're still curious. So I don't really know what the author is trying to say with this article. Is there actually a problem, and if so how bad is it? I'm all for changing up the science fair and evolving it and doing a new format, but I don't think they're especially lacking in innovative spirit as the author implies.