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science fair

Colorado State Science Fair 2011

And yes! I made it to the state science fair! After mono stopped me last year, I was kind of wondering what the follow-up act might be.

This fair wasn’t really any different from the other fairs I’ve done, other than being bigger – and of course, the projects generally being incredibly high quality. Which makes sense, considering these were the winners from the regional science fairs. I think that everyone in my category did a great job and had a lot of enthusiasm for science, which makes me happy.

There were five judges in my group. I was the only woman, and also the youngest by far. The latter isn’t really a surprise; the average age of a science fair judge is pretty high. Probably because science-y people don’t have a lot of volunteering time to use in the middle of the week until they’re long out of grad school or their entry-level industry job. I’m also used to there not being many women in my normal category – Earth sciences – because that’s really what the demographics for older people working in that field look like right now. And all of the guys were really nice, as usual – downright avuncular, truth be told.

The surprising thing was that every student in my category was female. For reals. I think the other judges were a bit shocked, and were kind of wondering where all the boys had gotten to. (One of them made a joke about none of the boys going outside any more because they’re all playing too many video games…) I’m guessing that this was just some kind of fluke, since I have no idea what the makeup of the category looked like last year, or will look like in the future. But it was pretty exciting to see that many young women that enthusiastic about earth sciences.

One difference from the regional fairs was the huge number of “special awards” judges, which isn’t something you normally see in smaller fairs. This was a bit frustrating at times, since some projects were in line to be judged for a lot of special awards, and that made it really hard to get in and actually talk to the student. I’ll have to check tomorrow to see what all of the results ended up being. As soon as we’d done places for our category, I got to go home… our poor team captain has to stay until late tonight, since that’s apparently when the knock-down drag-out fight between judges over best in show happens. Good luck to him.

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science fair

Science Fairs and Wind Chill

The DPS District Science Fair was a lot of fun, as usual. We had a kind of ridiculous number of judges this year – not that a large number of volunteers is a bad thing – so we did most of the fair in teams. I actually rather like team judging, since it means that the kids tend to be more thoroughly questioned about their project. Judges seem to have a couple favorite lines of questioning, and as long as they don’t overlap that means we’re generally more thorough.

Of course, my own favorite sorts of questions are:
– Now that you’ve done your whole project, if you could change one or more things about your experiment design or your hypothesis, what would you do? (I like this question, since it shows if they’ve really thought about what they did and picked out sources of error.)
– Can you explain [insert basic scientific principle behind the experiment here] to me? (Which shows if they actually understood any of the research they did.)

This time I got a boot up into middle school, looking at eighth grade projects. To be honest, the three my team looked at didn’t really wow me… they all had some serious design issues, and in one case the student couldn’t explain the basic scientific concept behind their experiment. Which was sad, since the experiment itself would have been a good one if there’d been some deeper understanding there. Also, as usual everyone had “literature” cited on their boards, but very few students incorporated it into their discussion or conclusion.

So parents, if you’re reading this – make sure your kid actually incorporates their research into their experiment and understand it! Otherwise, it really gives the impression that they looked up a bunch of sources and just stuck them on the board because they had to, without actually reading and understanding anything.

Which, I suppose, really prepares them to be freshmen in college, huh.

The thing that set all of the grade winners out this year was definitely use of research – the first place in each grade actually did additional research after their project was done, so they could discuss their possible sources of error or reasons for unexpected results. Which is quite charming. And the winner for all of middle school was a sixth grader, which was pretty surprising. He did a model rocket project which involved testing different design elements, predicting how they would affect the flight of the rocket, and then figuring out why things didn’t go the way he predicted when they inevitably didn’t. It was pretty impressive.

Anyway, for a bit of excitement, I realized that the Colorado State Science and Engineering Fair has its judging on a Thursday. Now that I’ve dropped a class, I’m free that day, so I can participate in that one! And it’s even more exciting because this year, I can be sure I won’t come down with mono again. Wahoo.

It’s cold as hell here right now, and only going to get colder. I’m doing an experiment of my own – I pinned blankets over the patio door, since that seems to turn into a little wind tunnel at times, and I’m going to see if the house stays a little warmer. Tengu is already mad as all get out because he was content to stay away from the patio door until the blankets went up, and then he had to OMG LOOK OUT THERE RIGHT NOW. Except I won’t let him, since he might pull the blankets down. Yay for cat drama.

Really, I’m just looking forward to making like The Day After Tomorrow and running away from the cold air. It’s something to do, since in a moment of brilliance I left my homework at school, where it’s going to do me a lot of good. I’m really not looking forward to trying to get to school tomorrow morning, considering this morning it took about two hours each way.

Also, I’ve added some amazing entries to my “Undergrads say the darndest things” file, but I feel like I shouldn’t share them until after the semester is done.

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science fair

Science Fair Season

Ah, it’s that glorious season, when the sale of tri-fold boards spikes, and eager young scientists stand ready to excitedly tell judges how they grew mold on bread or watered plants with a variety of appalling substances. It’s science fair season!

I actually feel a little sad about it this year. Because of my class and teaching1 schedule, the only one I can possibly volunteer for is the DPS District Science Fair, since it’s on a Saturday. The rest take place on weekdays, when I can’t afford to miss. I’m particularly disappointed that I’ll have to miss the Colorado state science fair again. That’s the one I missed last year because I’d just come down with mono and, I was informed, looked like I was going to die.

Bread mold jokes aside, this sort of volunteering is something that anyone who cares about science education should take seriously. Particularly when it comes to people who make their living in the sciences (either in academia or in the private sector) it really does make a huge difference for kids to meet us as judges. It’s one thing to hear about how cool science is in school, and another entirely to meet real grown ups who do real science for a living.

To my fellow Coloradoans, particularly any Denverites that might be reading this, it’s time to get involved!

Denver Public Schools science fair information
Denver metro science fair information
Colorado state science fair information

If you’re not a Colorado resident, don’t despair – there are science fairs everywhere in the country, and this is the time of year they get started, preparing for the International Science Fair. If you’re interested in judging for a fair, a good place to start looking for your local events is on the Intel ISEF website. Though that’s by no means an exhaustive list and all you really need is some Google-fu.

Make a kid’s day. Make a difference. And as a bonus, there are normally cookies.

1 – Still feels so, so weird to be saying that.

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for fun science fair skepticism

Enough With the Zombie Hamburgers

A while ago, there was a rash of postings all over the internets about the sinister Happy Meal That Would Not Die or the utterly disturbing McDonald’s hamburger that had been preserved since, I don’t know, the last ice age or something. The conclusion of the woman with the ancient hamburger is:

Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike – this is a chemical food. There is absolutely no nutrition here.

Note: everything is made of chemicals. Everything.

This even got a mention on Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe (#274), with many a good hypothesis as to why a hamburger might act this way. It was something that definitely could be tested scientifically, and no one had bothered.

Until now.

Every day, I monitored the progress of the burgers, weighing each one, and carefully checking for spots of mold growth or other indications of decay. The burgers were left in the open air, but handled only with clean kitchen tools or through clean plastic bags (no direct contact with my hands until the last day).

This is why I love, love, love reading Serious Eats. Some of the contributors are made of 100% pure WIN.

Read the post, but the punchline is that the author made his own (“all-natural”) hamburger the same size as the McDonald’s one and set them head to head. They both dehydrated nicely and turned into hamburger jerky. This comes as no surprise to anyone who doesn’t ascribe to the idea that McDonald’s is trying to destroy the world by feeding everyone food made out of plastic. Or whatever.

Of course, it’s a small sample size and yadda yadda. We must need some replication! It sounds like an awesome way to flavor the air of your house with the stench of old hamburger. This would, I think, make an EXCELLENT science fair experiment for a kid with extremely tolerant parents.

Good on you, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. Good on you, Serious Eats. You get a skeptic gold star today.

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science fair

Speaking of science fairs…

A wonderful story about three Palestinian girls going to Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair.

I think the article really highlights how important these events are for students – even on the local level. If nothing else, science fairs give students like these girls motivation to try their hand at solving a problem – either through engineering or scientific investigation.

And this?

The girls beat dozens of contestants in the West Bank to win the prize. But even after that, they ran into one last obstacle: There was only enough prize money to allow two girls to make the trip. After drawing lots, Asil was to be left behind as her classmates headed to San Jose.

UN workers heard this and pooled money last week to purchase an additional ticket. When Asil heard the news on Monday, she broke into tears, leaping up from the table to embrace her classmates.

Blub.

It’s an amazing story to begin with, but you’ll have to forgive me if my blub is just a little blubbier because it’s three girls who have won this opportunity.

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science fair

Done with science fairs for this school year

Today was the Merrill Middle School science fair, which was my last for the school year. I’m definitely planning to continue volunteering next year, since this has been a lot of fun. And hopefully, I’ll have a better attendance record. This year went like this:

  • Grant Middle School (January) – missed, due to horrible stomach bug that caused 12 hours of endless vomiting
  • DPS district fair (January) – Made it to this one
  • Denver Metro fair (February) – Made it to this one
  • Colorado State fair (April) – missed, due to having mono

    • …so with today, that gives me what, a 60% attendance rate? Oof. And I really could have done without the mono. And the vomiting.

    This was actually the first fair that I’ve made it to that was just for one school. It was also apparently strangely timed, since the district, regional, and state fairs were all over with – any student with a good project in this fair wouldn’t have had anywhere to go. Which is sad for them, since there were some pretty good projects that at the very least deserved to go to the district-wide fair, I think. From what the volunteer coordinator said, the school’s likely to shift their schedule soon so their students do have those opportunities. Which is great.

    The difference between this fair and, say, the district fair was pretty apparent. The projects had a really wide range of quality, from “I just came up with something because I had to” to “Wow.” A lot of the projects were pretty lackluster, but there were some that still really stood out. We actually had a pretty tough time choosing the best in show from among the first place winners; all of them definitely deserved their prizes, and in the end I think the grand prize winner only really edged out ahead because he’d done a little more background research and had whipped out some pretty impressive math for an eighth grader. (Or, as I put it, “Can you guys believe it? An eighth grader, using pi! Voluntarily!”)

    From the three fairs that I actually made it to, these are the things I’ve noticed that really make some of the projects stand out:

  • Actual research having been done. I was pretty surprised how unusual this was. I guess I just sort of assumed that in the age of easily accessible internet (the school library at Merrill had an impressive array of iMacs) that we’d at least be seeing Wikipedia references. And while Wikipedia doesn’t cut it if you’re in college, I’d be more than happy to settle for that from elementary or middle school kids particularly. As it is, most of the kids managed to come up with a question and a reasonably testable hypothesis, but then never took the step of seeing what information was already out there about their topic.
  • A connection to scientific concepts beyond use of the scientific method. I remember how blown away I was by the fifth grader at the district science fair who connected his “fun with fluids”-type experiment to a broader exploration of Newtonian versus non-Newtonian fluids. The grand prize winner at Merrill did his experiment on the speed at which ice in different shapes melted, and made assessing surface area (and surface touching a hot cookie sheet in the oven) integral to that. I suppose that this is something that goes hand-in-hand with the research, since it’s hard to make this kind of connection without doing a little reading. Most projects seem to take a question (“which kind of football can I throw the farthest”) and even come up with plausible explanations in their conclusions (“this one went farther because it was smooth and light”) without ever looking at why their results turned out that way (“smooth things are more aerodynamic and right now a lighter football is easier for me to throw because I haven’t hit my growth spurt yet”). That means that the few projects where the kid takes that extra step and connects their small experiment to a greater body of work really stand out.
  • Repetition of trials and controls. Most experimental design for these projects is extremely simple, which is how it should be. Unfortunately, that also tends to mean that the kids either forget about (or perhaps haven’t been told about) keeping proper controls or doing multiple trials so that the results can be averaged. This is another thing where when it does happen, it really impresses the judges because it’s so unusual. It’s even more impressive when the student can explain why they did it that way, since that lets us know that they didn’t just do it because an adult told them to.
  • The student can tell you what they would have done differently. My favorite question to ask a student always comes at the end; I ask them, “Knowing what you do now, if you could go back in time and re-do your experiment, what would you change?” Most of the time, the answer I get is a shrug or some variation thereof. But sometimes, I get a great answer from the student, detailing how they would avoid mistakes, or fix a flaw in their methodology, or even redesign the entire experiment because their first shot didn’t produce data that was useful to answering their question. Those are the answers I love, because it proves that the student does have a grasp of how experimental science works – it’s all about seeing your own mistakes and refining your process. I admit that I also love it when students find out their hypothesis was wrong; most of the time they ask a question that they already knew (or thought they knew) the answer to and use the experiment as a way of proving themselves right.

    • So, I’m looking forward to the next school year, when the science fairs start up again. Hopefully I’ll be able to work volunteering in around my grad school schedule. One unexpectedly fun thing is that I’ve started to get to know the little community of local science fair judges. You see a lot of the same faces from fair to fair, which is neat. The smaller fairs seem to be dominated by geologists and engineers, though with a sample size of only two I can’t say that for sure. We’ll see in the fall!

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    awesome science fair

    Denver Metro science fair

    I spent most of my day yesterday at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a judge for the Denver Metro Science and Engineering Fair. I thought the Denver Public School science fair was going to leave me feeling more confident, but I was wrong.

    The environment was just very different. At the DPS fair we had to look at four or five projects over the course of two hours. At this fair, it was 10 projects in the same amount of time, and this time I also didn’t have a partner. There were two other judges looking at the same ten projects as me, so it meant we got to chat about them a little, which helped. But I was on my own with talking to the kids, and that was a bit nerve wracking at first just because I wasn’t quite sure what questions to ask. Then again, with 10 projects and only two hours, I didn’t have a whole lot of time to spend with each kid; a little less than ten minutes to talk, and then a few minutes to go off in a quiet corner to write some comments on the scoring sheet.

    I’m not the best at talking to people I don’t know, but I think I muddled through well enough once I’d had a couple practice runs. I basically started off by asking the kid to just describe their project to me and tell me why they had wanted to do it. From there, I was normally able to find a couple of questions to ask, like, “How many trials did you run?” or “Which variables did you control?” or even, “If you had this to do over again, what would you change about your setup?” I actually got some extremely good answers for that last question, which made me happy. A big part of this sort of experimentation is running one experiment, figuring out all of the things you did wrong that make your results less than useful, and then trying again with the design flaws fixed.

    This time I was also dealing with a higher grade level – the junior division, 6-8 grade – as well, so the projects were understandably more complex. I was put in the physical science category, which I felt a little out of my depth in since I’m not a chemistry or physics person. Then again, we weren’t really dealing with chemistry/physics more complex than you’d get out of your first two semesters, which is still impressive in itself when you realize that it’s middle school students working on these projects.

    Aside: Some of the kids I spoke with were as tall as me. This should be illegal.

    Overall, the quality of the projects was extremely impressive. I can’t imagine being able to come up with anything as cool as some of the experiments now, let alone when I was thirteen. I’m not going to say anything about the winning or favorite projects at the moment, since I checked the schedule and the awards ceremony isn’t actually until tonight. And while I doubt that any of the three or four people that read this blog have kids that participated in the science fair, if I’m putting this out on the internet I think it’s best to just keep it under my hat.

    Several of the kids I talked to pointed to an episode of Mythbusters as the reason they wanted to try a particular experiment to see for themselves. Warm fuzzies all over again for that. One of the projects that I saw (though it wasn’t in my category) even had “Myth Busted” in its title. I was also incredibly happy to see a lot of young girls with some really fantastic projects and a lot of enthusiasm for the scientific process.

    I’m still trying to mentally sort through my day. It was bigger, louder, and much more hectic than the other science fair, as one might expect. I’m considering seeing if I can volunteer for the Colorado State science fair. I think it’d be a great experience to spend a Thursday in April feeling completely stunned by how much smarter than me a bunch of teenagers are.

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    awesome science fair

    My first science fair

    As a judge, at least. I know I did at least one science fair when I was in elementary school, which involved an extremely lame experiment that had to do with getting mold to grow on bread. I wasn’t all that excited about it. Now I can look back on my lack of enthusiasm as a wasted opportunity, but I think I turned out okay.

    I was actually supposed to judge in a school science fair a couple of weeks ago. The night before was when the Stomach Virus Fairy visited me, however, and I was in no condition to go. So this was my first one.

    The judging actually went differently then I expected. We were each assigned a grade, and then put in teams. I ended up being very grateful for this; a big part of judging a project is asking the kid questions about their project, and I didn’t really know where to start. My partner, Shannon, is an old hand at science fairs and knew exactly what sorts of questions were appropriate to ask the kids. I ended up being assigned to the fourth grade projects.

    Looking around the room, though, there were some pretty cool projects to be seen. You could tell a lot of these kids were seriously jazzed about their experiments and had put a lot of thought and work in to it.

    My personal favorites:

    – A project exploring whether cats have a color preference, which included photographs of the two adorable experiment subjects, Pirate and Lucy.

    – A project about the power of suggestion (regarding things like pareidolia) where the hypothesis was (paraphrasing a little): “Using the force of my personality and their trust in me, I will cause people to give me the answers I suggest.”

    And then of course, the project that ultimately won first place for fourth grade. All of us noticed the project board right away because it looked super good and professional. After our first two kids, Shannon and I stopped and looked at the board a little closer and noticed that the experiment was about the way non-Newtonian fluids react to pressure. Both of us immediately thought, “We so hope we get to talk to this kid.”

    We did! We’re so lucky. The kid, named Roger, that did the experiment has got to be the most well spoken fourth grader I’ve encountered in my life. Hell, he was more coherent and well-spoken than a lot of the kids I’ve met at college. Shannon quizzed him unmercifully about his experiment, and it became very apparent that he was deeply interested in what he’d done, and that he also really understood the subject matter. The part that really just blew me away was when he talked about the two non-Newtonian fluids he used – ketchup and water mixed with corn starch. We asked him why the two fluids had reacted so differently when he tried to stir them quickly, and he told us that he’d been confused about that at first, then had done more research and discovered that the ketchup must be a shear-thinning non-Newtonian fluid, while the water with corn starch was a shear-thickening non-Newtonian fluid. And then explained the basics of what shear force is.

    Sometimes I really worry about the future, particularly seeing the hit science often takes in public schools. Meeting kids like Roger – and pretty much everyone who had made it to the district-wide fair – gives me hope for the future. There are still boys and girls out there that are really interested in science and excited about exploring the world around them.

    One of the other incredibly cool things that I just have to share – at the beginning of his discussion, I asked Roger why he’d decided to do this experiment. He told me that he’s a huge fan of the Myth Busters and had seen them run across the water/corn starch fluid in their episode about ninja. And that the third phase of his experiment, where he put the different liquids in to a speaker cone to see how they reacted to loud music, he’d seen on The Big Bang Theory and thought it looked really cool, so he wanted to try it himself.

    I hope wherever they are, Adam and Jamie and Bill Prady are feeling a big warm fuzzy. There are amazing little kids like Roger out there watching and being inspired to try out the science. That’s surely something to be proud of.