Reflections from a science fair judge

On 18 January, when I picked up my kids from school, my daughter handed me a note that said, “To Mommy: I made it to the regionals!!!!!!”

Science fair at my kids’ elementary school is a day of excitement mixed with disappointment and exhaustion. This year, for the second time, I volunteered as a judge. I evaluated projects by fourth-grade students (my twins are in third grade). There were a lot of great projects and just a few duds.

Science projects are mandatory for third grade on up. (Participation in science fair is optional in middle and high school.) Children submit their topics for approval six weeks in advance. Projects must include an experiment, and there are certain no-nos, such as the use of bacteria. Both the children and their parents acknowledge in writing that they will stick with their topic and complete the project on time.

When the due date finally arrived, kids with their large poster boards filed into school in the sprinkling rain. I heard lots of relieved parents. Overall, parents’ attitudes seem to fall into two camps: They find the whole thing burdensome, or they see the projects as fun and more worthwhile than most other homework. I’m in the second camp, though I’d prefer that the kids get more coaching at school. They would benefit from such exercises as critiquing past posters and practicing how to present to judges.

The projects get elaborate, and parents are involved to a greater or lesser extent in nearly all cases. My own kids worked hard on their projects: My daughter tested 22 subjects on perceptions of their memory. My son dropped a bead into different liquids to see how viscosity affects ripples. They made posters and practiced presenting their work. The ideas were their own, but they got help with the experimental design, the analysis (like using software to make bar graphs and grayscale profiles), and putting the posters together. Matching my daughter’s glee and glory was my son’s disappointment that his project was not selected to go on to the regional competition.

Judges worked mostly two to a class. We selected three or four projects from each class to be assessed by all of that grade’s judges. Kids had, for example, measured the effect of industrial waste on soil acidity, compared sea rise at the North and South Poles as a result of melting ice caps, considered how cello strings produce different sounds, and looked for correlations by age with how people play rock-paper-scissors.

When the fourth-grade judges convened to evaluate the finalists, we quickly converged on a top project: a motor that converts heat into mechanical energy. It was also relatively easy to agree on a couple of projects to pull out of the running. The hard part was differentiating between many really good projects; we could send three to the regionals and select three alternates.

We began to look for reasons to drop projects. In some cases, kids tackled really tough concepts but couldn’t explain some of the data or information on their posters. Other projects were deemed too simplistic. We also considered how well the kids presented their projects and answered questions and whether they had ideas for how to improve their experiments. The decisions were tough.

When I judged the school science fair last year, one boy came in saying his father had promised him $50 if he went to regionals. Based on my judging experience, his chances of getting that money hinged on some luck: Choices have to be made, and inevitably there is some arbitrariness. Some of the projects that don’t make the cut are of the same caliber as those that do.