Science fairs are as flawed as my solar-powered hot dog cooker
statnews.com
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No, it was an exercise in barriers. Everybody [1] has enough "privilege" to do this experiment, by which I mean the experiment itself without the "fair" elements, with little more than a slightly-interested science teacher. They just aren't allowed to do it by the science fair. Being able to speak with "actual" scientists about counting bacteria is at most a slight bonus; it is not necessary to the process, learning about it by reading would be a fine education on its own, and even failing at the process would be educational in its own way, as the author describes in his own experiences. (Science fairs have a major role to play in the pernicious idea that science is only "successful" when it obtains the positive result the experimenter was looking for... but that's a separate rant.)
This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs. If "privilege" issues were as easy as just removing some regulation, we probably wouldn't be talking about it so much.
[1]: Everyone plausibly within the scope of this article, anyhow, which is places that have science fairs at all. That would be a separate issue.
I don't think the author or anyone else disagrees... the article was specifically about science fairs, not science projects generally. It's right in the title. And reiterated in the portion of the text where the author juxtaposes their childhood experience with their child's experience.
> This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs.
It's both (which gets to the heart of what I consider the most compelling arguments for decreased regulation). Whenever there are bureaucratic barriers, knowing the right sorts of people works wonders. You might even say it's a privilege...
If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they took the time.
You don't actually need an incubator. Bacteria won't grow as fast at room temperature, but for the kind of experiment she was doing that should not be a problem.
Nevertheless, it is actually pretty easy to make an incubator. Google for "homemade bacterial incubator" and you'll find many sites offering instructions. A typical design uses an aquarium tank, an incandescent lamp, a dimmer, and a thermometer. This should be well within the capability of any middle schooler.
If the kid is up for doing a little programming, they could even toss in an Arduino and use a dimmer that can be controlled by it and automate keeping the temperature constant.
The rest of the things needed, like Petri dishes, agar, and such are available from Amazon. There are even kits specifically aimed at people who want to grow bacteria for science fair projects.
The physical requirements for science are easy to get. Specific experiments may be hard, but that's a characteristic of the experiments, not "science". The hard part is all in the attitude, learning to look for reasons why you are wrong instead of right. It is not in the physical gear and it's not in following a particular checkbox procedure thoughtlessly. (If I could, I'd remove "The Scientific Process" from the curriculum. It's a misnomer, literally starting from the word "The".) It is a grave failure of the education system that so many people come out of it thinking otherwise.
Science fairs have the goal of showing everybody they can do science. This is the only sensible goal, because as a mechanism for actually doing science they are worthless. If they fail that goal, they are worthless. Once again, this is a place where people confuse the mechanisms for the goals, a problem our society is having a lot of problems with lately. If the science fair is run in a way that extra super hard convinces people you need "real scientists" and lab coats and training and specialized equipment, it is of negative value and the optimal thing to do is just shut it down.
This science fair should be shut down. It is doing harm and no good.
I'm not saying someone couldn't hack together this experiment. I'm saying a middle-schooler who can walk into a lab and prepare everything in an afternoon under professional supervision is at an advantage compared to a middle-schooler who has to gather all this equipment and knowledge over the course of weeks and months (which will still be inferior from a non-didactic point of view) without the support of their parents when it comes to performing a valid scientific experiment.
I thought the point of this article was that Veronica was specifically told she couldn't do this experiment as you describe:
We also learned that this experiment was so potentially dangerous that Veronica
would have to carry it out under the supervision of a trained expert, who would
first have to submit a detailed risk assessment.
I feel like I'm confusing something somewhere.
As long as we're discussing privilege, the correct use of privilege would be to tell the school to just go to hell, run the experiment anyhow with the probably $10 of equipment you need, and submit something to the actual science fair as perfunctory as possible that will let you pass (leaning on your "privilege" to pass). And skip the visits to the microbiologists, because that proves the wrong point. You should be doing this on your own.
This is the path to the dark side. And by the dark side, I mean living amidst the ruins trying to find someone to blame for where it all went wrong.
Somewhere between "We choose to go to the moon" and "if you see something, say something" we traded all of our hope for fear. That sucks.
That is the most succulent summary of the state of things I have ever read.
As long as it doesn't include food or live animals - you're cool.
I absolutely hated science fairs growing up, and I can remember every one of them as an embarrassment.
The U.S. is starting to get as bad as Heian Japan -- where the obsession of aristocrats on maintaining their privilege meant making a mockery of the Confucian institutions they imported from China.
I'm also interested in knowing more about Heian era Japan -- my knowledge is limited to reading about the Heian Self Defense Force in Urusei Yatsura and that's probably dodgy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji
For what is is worth, women played an early role in Japanese literature, probably because men thought there wasn't any status to be had writing fiction. Funny enough, many Japanese comic creators such as Rumiko Takahashi and Naoko Takeuchi are women too, but nobody in the U.S. compares to male creators such as Wolfman, Lee, Kirby, etc.
Something which would be unexceptional from the professional adult professional is laundered into an impressive or even newsworthy item when (supposedly) done by a child.
You mean worked hard to provide their kids with a better future.
The parents who are gung ho about their kid's education are usually the new upper middle class type.
The biggest privilege these kids have is that their parents care about their education. Money does not provide much of an advantage.
The Internet has been a great equalizer in terms of educational resources.
Since when did school quality and neighborhood income stop correlating? When did private schools become free? When did after school tutoring and test prep programs become free to attend and provide free transport to and on demand?
All of these things take money, and all of them a positively correlated with achievement, and quite out of reach of poor people.
The issue here is that ISEF, Intel and other organizations that sponsor national science fairs don't want a PR disaster when it turns out that the winning project violates standards for institutional review and consent. That would be a major scandal and PR black eye. The only way to avoid this is by having every participant at every level complete the appropriate pre-clearance for the experiments.
As with any experiment, doing any kind of work with animals (even house pets) is subject to strict scrutiny, and any work done on humans, even siblings, even yourself, is subject to the highest level of review. As others have said, this is a fact of life in science, and learning about informed consent sooner rather than later is actually a valuable lesson.
There are legitimate arguments beyond just "for PR"
Just by way of example, I saw a very funny TV show in which the setup was this: someone dressed up in a beekeeping suit walked through a public park with a stack of white boxes, stumbled, dropped them, and started sprinting in the other direction. The show did this several times and aired the footage.
It turns out that people in a public park are likely to run after the seemingly-panicked guy in bee armor when he runs away from a pile of boxes he just dropped. If you wrote a paper about this after doing it rather than showing your footage on TV, it would be totally unexceptional as a psych experiment. But writing the paper doesn't make the experiment any more or less dangerous to the unwitting subjects. It's just the trigger for institutional review.
The review system exists because professional researchers today generally are not self-funding. This isn't a problem for science fair entrants.
Imagine if she had somehow fostered a deadly pathogen on her toothbrush and through a mistake outside of her level of expertise managed to contaminate something/herself.
The mentorship of a professional was probably for safety reasons. Safely handling bacteria, avoiding contamination, etc. Which is partially why a risk assessment had to be filed (what are the chances of a deadly pathogen being raised in the samples?). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but that's how I understood the situation.
I don't believe safety regulations should be waived for minors because "reasons" or "fostering an interest in science". Even if that makes life unfair.
The idea was to try to kill bacteria in the toothbrush after she used it. By definition, she was already "infected". Does she need a waiver every time she is going to brush her teeth? Because I guarantee the toothbrush is not routinely subjected to that level of sterilization.
The only argument I can think of is that she could be creating bacteria more resistant to whatever was that she was trying to use to disinfect. But if that's a problem, then we should all focus on banning antibacterial soap first.
Excess paperwork never solves any problems.
There are industry-standard protocols for performing this kind of work, and the school has a clear responsibility to ensure they are followed.
I've worked in high-energy or high-risk systems nearly all of my career. There is such a thing as managed risk. The school didn't tell the family that they couldn't do the experiment. Instead, they owned up to the fact that the school didn't know how to manage this particular situation's risks correctly, and instead deferred to someone who did. That's a totally rational and reasonable response.
Growing bacteria in agar is something that was completely de rigueur in elementary school when I was in elementary school in the 1980s. If this is a high-risk activity, I'm sure you'll have no problem finding some account of it every having done any damage in the conservatively hundreds of thousands of times it was done.
The difference between petri dishes with what was often a specified bacteria/mold and the bacteria from a person's mouth should be self-evident.
As brandmeyer pointed out, the girl may have had bacteria while showing no sign of having an illness (example given was strep throat). Having a small amount of the bacteria and then raising a colony of it could pose some risk of getting others sick.
In fact, it has given rise to a cottage industry of science fair mentors-for-hire. If you can find a highly enough motivated high school teacher to manage the paperwork, and can find a lab that has the correct rating for whatever you are doing, then great for you. Otherwise, there are a few places that can provide lab space and a mentor at an hourly fee, not to mention experience in getting the mountain of paperwork correct. It is good to have money to rub on the problem -- I'm sure a lot of kids get left behind because of that.
My daughter did an electronics project -- and the paperwork was still daunting, even though we could check "N/A" to all the biohazzard management sections, lab-has-eyewash, mentor qualified to handle animal tissues, etc. We still had to submit schematics and test plan material -- which is OK I guess because it is probably worthwhile to see if the project involves a direct connection to 220V AC mains before things get out of hand.
In the end though, one of the biggest problems with science fairs is getting enough qualified judges. The kids pour countless hours into the project, and hope for a 5-10 minute visit from 4 judges. If you are lucky, the judge might actually have a clue about your area of science or technology. Then the judging team tries to figure out some winners. One of the best ways anyone here on HN could help is to volunteer an afternoon per year to be a judge. Fairs are always short of qualified judges. Heck, they are short of judges that can fog a mirror. The best thing you can do for these kids is give them your time to encourage them and hopefully nudge the system towards a rational result.
My school's science fair just required the teacher to sign off on it that it wasn't dangerous. My experiment involved running electricity through water (to turn rust back into metal), and no one cared.
After the informational meeting, I told my kid, point blank, "No people. No animals. Plants. How about a nice experiment involving plants?"
All that without paperwork, and I'm not even very old -- I'm only in my early 20s.
Is this primarily the case in the US, or did I just manage to avoid it during my school days? I performed experiments that were probably no safer than those described here[0], and the only hurdle I had to pass was satisfying my teacher that it was safe enough (which boiled down to an informal a) you've thought about the risks, and b) aren't reckless; no actual paperwork)
[0] e.g. giving 16/17 year old unsupervised access to a 5kV power supply. The current used wasn't dangerous (pretty unpleasant to be shocked by though!), but it would destroy equipment easily (we went through 10+ multimetres, even though they were allegedly rated for that voltage) and the spark would set fire things pretty easily (paper, leaves, etc.)
P.S. Yes I'm aware a number of these chemicals can be picked up locally at Home Depot etc. to be "played" with at will, but this doesn't negate how public-funded experimental research is done.
I can understand your comment about younger adolescents vs older ones. 12 year olds can be more genuinely curious and less "looking for an angle" than their older, near-college-age contemporaries. That's not universal by any means, among all kids curiosity is a trait we ought to encourage, not squelch.
First, ensure that schools have enthusiastic and supportive teachers that are willing to stay back after school to work with kids on their science projects.
Second, remove the barrier to entry. That is, get rid of assessment and acceptance into science fairs being based on verbose entry forms. Have preliminary rounds where all students get the joy and buzz of representing at a science fair.
In Ireland the traditional science fair has been the BT Young Scientist Exhibition. This competition garners the most money and media attention. Every year thousands of applications are submitted. These applications are quickly narrowed down to approximately five hundred which are allowed to represent at the fair. The way I see it, every year this fair is losing more future scientists and technologists than it is creating. What kid will be interested in following and pursuing science after they're discouraged by a rejected application form?
A new science fair in Ireland that we now have is SciFest. This competition is in a much more encouraging format. All students no matter what project they have get the opportunity to present their projects to judges in preliminary rounds before the winners are brought through to the next round. This is a much more inclusive format.
When they're alone then it doesn't workout so well.
Homemade spacecraft - okay we've all had fantasies of doing this and depending on how far you've gone with it the primary material starts off with sofa cushions or cardboard. The sky is limit (no pun intended) for ideas on it. Environmentally safe batteries- okay there's a lot of room for this one too (potatoes come to mind).
Not sure about the last one though. How does a child develop an Ebola test kit?!
"Dad can you get me some Ebola ... it's for a science fair project!"
Blah, blah. A guy with no arms will have a tough time eating with chopsticks. Equally irrelevant.
Clearly performing a "risk assessment" for an experiment involving washing a toothbrush with lemon juice and vinegar is an incredibly ridiculous display of bureaucratic insanity. I wonder if you need to sign a liability waiver for eating French fries with ketchup? (it contains vinegar, and stains!)
The "privilege" narrative is overplayed to begin with, and in this context it is absurd next to the elephant in the room.
But the argument that the kids with the most connections to real labs and real scientists win, is pretty solid. That totally jives with my experience judging regional science fairs. The top kid in each division was inevitably a professor's kid that did the experiments in the university lab. (e.g. "I then used the gas chromatograph...")