Media observers find lots to like in annual White House Science Fair
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8172
Media coverage of the recent 2016 White House Science Fair has been a pleasant respite from much of the political news.
Often even the print-media coverage has been visual. The Huffington Post‘s series of best White House Science Fair photos highlighted President Obama reacting with wide eyes and open mouth as visibly confident 14-year-old Joey Hudy of Phoenix, Arizona, launched a marshmallow from his Extreme Marshmallow Cannon. That launch took place in the White House’s state dining room during the 2012 fair. One of a recent set of pictures of the day at the UK’s Telegraph showed the president blowing a bubble from a wand made with a fair participant’s 3D printer. With a series of similar photos, the Wall Street Journal reported the fair online, complete with brief narrating captions. One caption quoted Obama: “As a society, we have to celebrate outstanding work by young people in science at least as much as we do Super Bowl winners.”
The president has brought up that comparison between exemplars in sports and science before. At the New York Times, online Dot Earth science columnist Andrew Revkin recalled something Obama said in announcing the first fair in 2009: “If you win the N.C.A.A. championship, you come to the White House.” Back then the president had continued :
Well, if you’re a young person and you’ve produced the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too. Scientists and engineers ought to stand side by side with athletes and entertainers as role models, and here at the White House we’re going to lead by example. We’re going to show young people how cool science can be.
Revkin called the 2016 fair “heartening.” Linking to a White House publicity page , he urged readers to take note. The publicity page offers a half-hour film about the science fair, starting with an introduction by two NASA astronauts aboard the space station.
Obama in 2009 summarized his view of why the science fair and STEM matter:
Yes, improving education in math and science is about producing engineers and researchers and scientists and innovators who are going to help transform our economy and our lives for the better. But it’s also about something more. It’s about expanding opportunity for all Americans in a world where an education is the key to success. It’s about an informed citizenry in an era where many of the problems we face as a nation are, at root, scientific problems. And it’s about the power of science to not only unlock new discoveries, but to unlock in the minds of our young people a sense of promise, a sense that with some hard work—with effort—they have the potential to achieve extraordinary things.
At National Public Radio, Robert Siegel spoke with 2016 White House Science Fair participant Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna of Elmont, New York. She has received college acceptances from every Ivy League school. She began, “It’s such an honor to be here ... to be able to share, like, what really makes me happy and my first love and my first passion, which is cement.”
Cement? Siegel couldn’t resist observing, maybe with some grown-up wryness, “That’s one of the most passionate statements about cement that I’ve heard on this program.” He asked her to elaborate. It turned out that she was ready for his question:
The 2010 Gulf oil spill was caused by an inadequate cement seal. So cement is used to seal an offshore drill, so my goal was to engineer a new cement seal. And I added attapulgite, which is a type of clay, to enhance the flowability of the cement, but also enhance the structure rebuilding, or how solid it becomes when it fills the oil well. So ultimately I found that the clays did enhance both of these properties, especially under the simulated high-pressure conditions of an oil well.
Siegel asked if, once in college, she would stay passionate about cement. She had thought seriously about that too:
I do hope to. I think the ultimate takeaway from conducting research with cement for three years is the importance of sustainable infrastructure development. So one of the things I want to do is actually share this knowledge because, frankly, I thought cement was just rocks and water in 10th grade. I didn’t understand that cement and concrete had this great application and immense application. So I definitely want to communicate with people and share this knowledge because this knowledge has definitely opened my mind. Throughout college, I hope to, yes, continue to pursue sustainable development—sustainable infrastructure development—and not only limited to cement, but just all infrastructure, you know, worldwide, as it is a very important facet in the world.
No doubt that youthful articulateness played well back home in New York. And in fact, often the science fair provided local news hooks, as in this headline from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch : “St. Louis-area Girl Scouts show off inventiveness at White House Science Fair.” A report at Newsday on Long Island began, “Three Long Island high schoolers—all inspired to clean up and prevent disastrous environmental oil spills—are among more than 100 young scientists selected nationally to exhibit their projects at the sixth annual White House Science Fair.” One of the three, of course, was Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna.
The White House made sure to connect the event to the wider realm of STEM-education politics. It issued an 18-page press release about the implications of the fair, with its more than 130 participants from more than 30 states. The release announces new public STEM measures and private STEM commitments. It summarizes seven years of what it calls “President Obama’s sustained and historic focus on giving every child the opportunity to excel at STEM education.” It extols the administration’s call in its final budget for "$3 billion for STEM-education programs, as well as a historic $4 billion proposal in support of [computer science] education for all students.” It also declares “new steps to empower local communities with the tools, people, and support they need to expand their STEM efforts.”
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.