Science Fairs Aren't So Fair | Hacker News Reader

Science Fairs Aren't So Fair

theatlantic.com

64 pointsklunger67 comments

I did a lot of science fairs in high school. I was pretty good at it, too; I'm currently paying for college with the help of some military research scholarships I won at an international science fair.

Here's my perspective on the whole thing. Take it as you will.

At the regional science fairs (where everyone starts out), there are a lot of people there who are only doing it because they have to. Usually, their high school requires it. A lot of these projects are shit, and a lot of them also clearly stole the idea or got help from their parents. All of these get eliminated at the regional level.

Then, we have the state level fairs.

When it comes to engineering projects (mechanical, electrical, or computer), almost 100% of the projects are actually done by the students themselves. It's very easy for engineering judges to tell when someone's bullshitting or didn't actually put in the work, so almost none of the bullshitters make it to the state level. Most of these people don't have any immediate family members who could help them, even if they wanted help.

When it comes to biological sciences (medicine especially) the situation is much different. Almost everyone in this category knows their shit, but it's a lot harder to say if they actually did the work themselves or not. A lot of the projects absolutely require that the students work in industrial lab environments. It's impossible for a student doing MRSA research to work in a lab below BSL-2, for example. A lot of these students get lab access through their parents (who may be doctors or researchers or something), so it's very likely they are working alongside their parent, and it's possible that they are working with the help of their parent. A huge portion of students doing this kind of research do have an immediate family member who can (and, with some likelihood, does) help them.

Because it's much harder for judges to sniff out people who didn't do original work in the biological sciences category, you get a lot more bullshitters in this category making it all the way to the top science fairs. They're still usually experts in whatever they're researching, but they didn't necessarily put in the thought or effort themselves.

When I was at Intel's international fair, the guy who won the top prize claimed to do some sort of cancer-detection research. It was pretty impressive stuff, but after the science fair a whole bunch of incriminating stuff came out. IIRC, there was some situation where his parent had a position of power at some major research university, and he essentially plagiarized the research of some researcher there with minor changes, but it was soon enough after the actual research that no one caught it.

I can't speak as much to the other categories (sociology, mathematics, etc.). I didn't have a lot of experience with those.

I think you're spot on with all of this. The only way to do good molecular/cell biological benchwork is with access to a bona-fide lab. I have a suspicion that I could ferret out most of the kids who didn't do the bio work, but I suppose there could be a few who know the nuances of the work really well (or they can make up plausible lies and state them with confidence).

It might be better to restrict these competitions to "engineering". You can do some pretty good engineering/programming even as a youngster.

>it's much harder for judges to sniff out people who didn't do original work in the biological sciences category

This applies to biological research all this way up the chain, including research done at top Universities, and by "top men".

Perhaps we should only fund the women then.

I went to the state science fair years ago in 8th grade, and nearly every single person I met there had a parent who was heavily involved in their project.

You could tell what each kids parent did from a living just by looking at the posters. The CS project kids had parents who were programmers, the kids with engineering projects had parents who were engineers etc...

Wow a lot of parental angst there. Lets take a paragraph out of that which summarizes this:

"Last year my son, who was in third grade at the time, came home with a sheet of paper from his school that listed three categories for appropriate projects: developing a hypothesis and conducting an experiment to test that theory, inventing something new, or researching 'something specific.' The guidelines listed 'whales' as an example of something specific. Given that my son was 8 years old, the idea that he could, on his own, do any single one of these things seemed ludicrous."

Ok, so here we have a parent which completely doubts what their kid can do. In my experience this is a pretty bad place for a parent to be, as the kids seem to always be more capable than parents expectation.

But the author really drives it home here:

"Even the easiest of these items—researching a topic—is nearly impossible for a child who hasn’t yet mastered the ability to browse the Internet. (As a parent and the founder of a tech company, I’ve observed that in order to browse the Internet one needs to know how to scan the screen, differentiate between actual content and ads, and evaluate the trustworthiness of a resource—elements that are far out of reach of most 8-year-olds.)"

Get that? Browse the Internet? Here is a question, how hard is it to pick up the volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica with the big "W" on the spine and turn to the page on "Whales" ? Not that hard. I'm sure the problem with that is that an 8 year old cannot be expected to drive themselves to the library. (only half joking).

But in context it says volumes about the parent and very little about the child. Even the poorest child can research things like the kinds of insects that live in their neighborhood. The sad part about this article is not that Science Fairs are not fair, its that parents don't know what science is and so cannot help there children develop a sense of wonder and discovery.

And what is truly heartbreaking for me is that the author's child has no hope of learning what science is from this person, and if they don't get it in school, well they will grow up believing anything they read on the Internet as truth. That makes for a very sad story indeed.

Yup, I agree! If we want to point fingers, lets point them at people of influence who should know better. But authors of internet articles are fairly low on that totem. Leaders in the sciences, public-policymakers, educators and marketers should all be held accountable for the public perception of science.

On one hand, science should be taught as an art. It is a creative endeavor, and when well-taught it engages the mind naturally. Why aren't we asking these kids what interests them and helping them apply the appropriate science?

On the other hand, science is incredibly useful and necessary to understand the world today, and fix the bugs in our social systems that otherwise are or will cause human suffering.

I think finding a handful of heroes to fix all our problems is dumb. We are at a point where fulfilling the greatest potential of all humans should be the goal of any thoughtful person.

Let people fix their own problems, but also let them borrow your tools. And science is an amazingly cool set of tools for fixing things.

I thought that was odd as well. I call boys at age around 7-8 as being "in the dinosaur phase", because that's when it seems a lot of boys get really excited about dinosaurs and read up a lot on them, spouting info. And if not dinosaurs, then football cards or similar.

I wouldn't expect an 8-year-old to 'evaluate the trustworthiness of a source', but I think that that's not what is actually expected of the students, and that it's just the parent trying to shoehorn in everything an adult is supposed to do when researching.

I also contest the author's estimate of what 8 year olds are capable of, having very clear memories of being that age myself, and generally always being underestimated by adults. Some of whom sounded like this one.

Luckily that set of adults did not include my own parents, who thought it would be fun to have a full encyclopedia at home, and I got pulled in by it no less than Wikipedia sometimes pulls me in, in adulthood.

"The sad part about this article is not that Science Fairs are not fair, its that parents don't know what science is and so cannot help there children develop a sense of wonder and discovery."

Very spot on.

I've been disgusted for years by the parade of "winners" of the major science fairs, most of whom have privileged access to research labs, wealth, or both. Because, protip: no high school student can do graduate-level scientific research. When you see that, it means that the student had special access to a lab that was already doing the work.

And yet, year after year, these folks are given lucrative scholarships and trotted out by the media as examples of the best-and-brightest scientific talent. There's no way to reform it -- there's an incentive to game the system, so parents will find a way to a game it. It's just one more example of the perpetuation of wealth across generations.

"It's just one more example of the perpetuation of wealth across generations."

You say that as if it's a bad thing. The thing you seem to be complaining about is one of the wonderful things about parenting. I.e. to impart/share/teach/give what you have accumulated over your life. Whether that is something physical, or intangible such as knowledge, makes no difference.

I agree with this. I struggled at first (with my daughter's performance in a recent science fair), but realized that my experience was a gift I could give to her in the form of a better-than-average ability to explain seemingly complicated ideas to an 8 year old. And to provide somewhat expert guidance on the scientific method itself.

To a certain extent, this happens in many other ways at schools as well. I mean, those kids with very athletic, or sports oriented, parents, may be more driven or have better guidance in athletic endeavors that would my kids. But we seem not to care about that (until the parents are screaming during a game).

And likewise with music, or art, and so on. So I think I've decided not to get too concerned about how others might view my daughter's work on her project. It would be unfair (to her) if I decided not to give her explanations that were the benefit of my own experience.

Your comment only contains a very individualistic perspective. Sure, it's a great experience to share some of what you have accumulated over your life, for you personally and for your children.

That doesn't mean that it's a purely good thing for society. It is the societal perspective that timr most likely had in mind.

The question is where that line is drawn. Is it really reasonable to hinder the progression of society to maintain your and your children's enjoyment of being in the elite?

A thought experiment: If Bill Gates decided to recruit the top 10,000 maths teachers in the world and shutter them away in a warehouse to perfect the ideal maths lessons solely for his children, would just be "one of the wonderful things about parenting"?

> no high school student can do graduate-level scientific research.

That's not true. I've seen better (original) science fair work than some PhD theses. It's just 1/1000 students that can pull it off.

And how do you know the student wasn't just a glorified proxy for their mentor?

By knowing them personally, and sometimes working alongside them.

Such as?

I went to a national science fair with a friend who (completely on his own) came up with a novel, patentable way of reducing drag on ships. I don't remember the details, but he went to the international stage with it, justifiably, and there was a fair bit of fluid dynamics involved.

For me, science fair was the only thing that kept me going to school. (Indeed, I dropped out the next year when I was disallowed from competing.) The project that got me to the nationals was about comparing the efficacy of genetic algorithms against neural networks in a game playing task (with a multi-machine, networked simulator); looking back, it was a big mess, and there was a lot of dumbness (that, if I had had even one mentor, could have been rooted out), but it wasn't dissimilar from unambitious master's projects in the CS department at my local university. Many projects at the national level were much more sophisticated.

Like any school competitions (does the author think math and programming contests are any different?), people with ambitious parents who push their children, and especially children in private schools (that often dedicate class time to working on these competitions), have a massive presence at the higher levels. But what's nice is that you don't have to have any of that to get to those higher levels, either. Motivation is a funny thing.

All sorts of stuff. A lot of the best, most novel research I saw was just students combining fields that wouldn't normally have much interaction at the university level. There was a lot of cool CS+medicine and MechE+biology research. Some of these projects would go on to present at major industry conferences.

> Because, protip: no high school student can do graduate-level scientific research

Of course they can. I do graduate research in quantum chemistry and molecular dynamics. You can easily do research-class DFT work with a personal computer, open source software, and a strong drive to learn. It's done all the time.

Granted, I use Titan for my largest simulations, but I've gotten publications out of work done solely on my Macbook Pro.

You say in your profile that you're a graduate student, so I don't understand your point. Are you trying to say that because the software is online, a high school student can do research?

Any high school student can download free software. That's not a question. Almost none can understand the math (I say "almost" because I'm sure there's some child prodigy out there who can; the exception makes the rule), and fewer still can conceptualize a question within the field that counts as scientific research.

The few (if any) prodigies who can surmount those hurdles are, by definition, already graduate-level researchers in the field, and are not piddling around with high school science fairs.

> Almost none can understand the math

See this is the point I disagree with. I think plenty of high school students can understand the math necessary to do cutting-edge scientific research. No need for child prodigies at all.

Maybe for work that's Nobel prize winning or something, but your average run-of-the-mill PhD student? I imagine tons of 14-18 year olds are capable of it.

I was writing my own Metropolis light transport programs when I was 17 by looking up articles on WoS and Google Scholar. Now I'm doing the same kind of thing -- just with MD instead. I don't think I've become any more intelligent since high school (or even that much more knowledgeable), and in fact, I was probably better at focusing back then than I am now since I didn't have so many distractions in my life. There's nothing atypical about me; I'm nowhere near the level of "genius", and I was not a child prodigy. So yes, I'm quite sure of my statement.

A big problem for high school students is to know what is cutting-edge research. I agree that knowing the math is rarely the problem. But I agree with timr's statement that "no high school student can do graduate-level scientific research." (We're excluding the very rare exceptions, like timr's example of high school students who have been working in a lab for years.)

There are two "cans" here; a high school student can do graduate-level scientific research from a techniques standpoint, like implementing a program for X or solving equation Y. But very few can do the interesting hypothesis generation aspect of graduate school.

I actually started in MD, though from a physics/math/CS background. I didn't understand the biology at all, and while I implemented a parallelized version of CHARMM back in 1992 (using PVM 2.x, no less), so was certainly capable of understanding the math and doing cutting-edge scientific research, I couldn't have come up with that research topic on my own.

Being unable to come up with an interesting research topic :) I left MD, did bioinformatics for a bit, and for the last 16 years I've been doing cheminformatics. The first 10 years was as a practitioner, and the last few years as an actual researcher, albeit self-funded. Implementation and research are different things. The younger me could have done all of the programming I do now, and the math is no more advanced than what's taught at the junior level of college, but didn't know the history of the field to identify what was actually cutting-edge vs. a technique described 20 years previous in the literature.

The current me, now with decades of experience in writing molecule-oriented software, and having read many articles across the 75 year history of the field, has found where there are interesting areas for new research.

The article says "students [with two exceptions] struggle with their projects because they lack inquiry skills, motivation, and an ability to reflect on what they’ve learned." I'm not sure I could convince the high school version of me to understand that subgraph isomorphism coupled with subgraph enumeration could be use to implement a groupwise maximum common subgraph, which can be used to identify a common scaffold for 2D depiction of a cluster of structures. There are a lot of intermediate steps to put it all together.

(In fact, I implemented this problem in the late 1990s, using a straight-forward backtracking algorithm from the 1980s. My newer version from 4 years ago is not only more clever and sophisticated, it's also a new algorithm.)

Nor should we expect a high school student to dig through the papers from the 1970s, which is the last time something like this approach was taken, figure out why it was put aside for several decades, and identify its connection to frequent subgraph mining. But it is something that we would expect from a graduate student.

FWIW, my most advanced high school science project was to build a radio telescope from an old clock radio and makeshift Yagi antenna. I managed to detect the sun. I also wanted to build a mass spectrometer, but couldn't get better than 1mm of vacuum out of an A/C vacuum. For government class, on the topic of the Strategic Defense Initiative, I built a railgun that could shoot about 2 inches using a few spools of wire, some old relays, and a borrowed power supply. Had I access to a school labs, mentors, and more than about $20 to spend, I could probably have had a much better science project.

Instead, I was part of the "vast majority of kids who get few resources beyond their parents." (Which came in handy when I wanted to get the glass cut for bottle I used for my mass spec. The owner of the glass store knew my grandfather from when both lived in Cuba, and cut the holes for free.)

I don't think any of those projects helped my greater understanding of science or doing research, which was the supposed goal of the science fair in the first place.

You indeed have a very good point which I had forgotten about. The literature search is a tremendous amount of work. I'm still confused three years into grad school why some articles make it into top journals and others do not. It mostly seems to come down to how novel and important the work is; not how "difficult" the work is to perform. I saw something in Nature the other day, and my first reaction was "Seriously? I could program that in a weekend." But then I began researching the topic and figured out no work had ever been done in that area before, and the result was really surprising and counterintuitive. The reason it was in Nature wasn't because the project was a lot of work; it was because it was a great idea that no one had thought of.

And it does seem like every new idea I think of has already been done in some form when I start searching for it. I thought I had discovered a new kind of interaction between hydrogen and lithium the other day. I did a search for articles between year 2000 and now -- nothing came up. I was really excited until I lowered the starting search year to 1980 and discovered the entire concept had already been exhaustively researched in the early 90s, and now there's not much more to say about it.

So yes, you're right; that would be difficult for a high school student.

At this point, it might sound like graduate student bias; but I am also a graduate student, and I also think plenty of high school students can understand the math necessary to do cutting-edge scientific research.

I'm actually a math graduate student, and I've been thinking about how capable a high school student would be of doing math research. This started because two years ago, I was asked to facilitate a summer program for gifted high school students that opens up the possibility of math research for high school students. Interestingly, this too suffered from some of the problems highlighted in the article. Many of the students who got into this program were clearly parentally guided, and they floundered. But many were not, and did really well.

This last summer, I had a pair of students particularly interested in cryptography [I'm a number theorist, and some of my bias comes through]. There is plenty of intersection between content a high schooler can understand and cryptography research, especially if it's interest-driven instead of industry-driven [I don't want to get into trials and travails of cryptographers here].

Would their ideas make money in the "real world of cryptography?" No. But they would make fantastic science fair projects, and they would especially benefit from several months of work instead of the 6 weeks that we had.

tldr; I agree with you. A good number a of high schoolers are capable of performing research.

Can understand versus could understand. One implies current background while the other implies potential ability. Given that many high school seniors graduate with only a basic grasp of Alg I, you're probably placing too high a value on the normalcy of your own experiences.

I understand this because I once ranked in the top 10 in my state for mathematics when I was a kid. So I potentially could have understood specialized maths if they were explained to me, sure, but where would I have gotten that exposure?

When I was in school, there was no Google Scholar or Wolfram or edX. We had EBSCOhost, but the librarian only knew how to pull up old issues of Forbes and Sports Illustrated. My generation's great boon was that we would grow up to live in a world where we would have free access to educational materials and other wonderful information over the internet.

I'm not making this an argument about privilege, but we should deeply consider whether our resources and backgrounds were so typical as we believe them to have been that any child put in our place would have had our abilities.

That's a fair point. I do think it's changing though. My sister is a fifth grade elementary school teacher (she teaches sixth grade math to the advanced class though). She was telling me the other day about how the students are all writing apps for their phones nowadays. I laughed and said, "Haha, no way. 5th graders??" She replied, "Yeah, one girl has been working on an app for organizing health information. She wants to go into the medical field and cure cancer when she's older. Her app lets you input names, body weight, height, and other health information". My jaw dropped. She went on, "It's strange; when we were younger, you were the only one I knew doing this weird stuff. Now they all are."

Granted, she's teaching a gifted class at a top ranked (public) elementary school, but still -- that many fifth graders know how to program for iOS or Android? I was surprised.

So I think your point is spot on. The next generation is going to "grow up to live in a world where we would have free access to educational materials and other wonderful information over the internet." The "could" will turn into a "can".

I would say you are wrong. You could reproduce someone else's research. But doing something novel requires that you understand a lot about which pitfalls make the simulation results unphysical, which I'd say takes at least 6 months to learn for a grad student working full time on a new topic.

Sure, it easily takes 6 months to learn the nuances of molecular dynamics. But high school students have tons of free time. Even with cross-country, track practice, and marching band, in high school I still had at least 4 hours of free time a day, 8-12 hours on the weekends, and all four summers in high school included three months of completely empty days. Heck, I had more time back then for research than I do now.

Let me give you my perspective as a parent who fully intends to give every possible educational boost to his child.

I have a job, and lots of other obligations. Quite frankly, I don't really care if she wins the science fair or not. I suspect that if she decides to compete when the time comes, she'll have a good shot at it just because of the level of effort we put into education and the equipment we have around the house. The majority of my free time and money is spent on this, so we have a lot of unusual stuff.

It's easy to put that kind of effort into your own kids, because they live with you. They're around for all of your spare moments, and they can use equipment you have access to that demands close supervision. Now here's the part that's relevant to your comment - I'm also heavily involved in her school, trying to do as much as I can for all of the other kids who are interested (the topics are computer science, math, and robotics). I get to spend maybe two hours a week working on that, after my other obligations are taken care of. It's simply not possible for me to do more for the school, and even if I could the problem is concentration of resources. Given a certain budget (time and money) that I have available for this project, it's obvious that I can make a large difference for a small number of kids, or a small (forgettable) difference for a large number. Taken to the extreme, I can make an enormous difference for one kid (mine). No matter what I try to do, I'll never be able to make that kind of difference for even a small classroom full of kids, and certainly not a whole school. So I'm left with this choice: Do I spend my resources in a pursuit that's likely to be ultimately fruitless (i.e. trying to "raise all boats"), or do I spend it on something I have a very high chance of success with? Which of those is more wasteful? My answer is that I do the best I can for the school, but I feel no guilt about giving more to my own kids.

In the end, if my daughter ends up winning a science fair it's going to look exactly like a case of inherited privilege, and maybe that's what it is. That's not because I'm trying to hold down everyone else though, it's just a simple matter of logistics. If I could give that kind of boost to everyone, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Because, protip: no high school student can do graduate-level scientific research.

My experience indicates otherwise. It's rare, to be sure, but it does happen.

Anecdotal evidence to the contrary: I was from an unprivileged background growing up in a dying blue collar steel town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that used to be the company town for ALCOA.

I was that one weird kid that was really into computers instead of football like everyone else. I taught myself C++ programming, OpenGL, and matrix math in high school because I wanted to develop 3D games.

I convinced my high school principal to let me enter a flight simulator that I wrote during summer break of sophomore year into the Pittsburgh Regional Science Fair (at my own expense), and I won. I remember standing on stage sticking out like a sore thumb from the usual snooty, upper class high schools that everyone knew from around the area.

That day, I met a robotics professor at CMU who was one of the judges, and that introduction, along with sending a DVD video of my work to a few top universities with my college application ended up changing my life.

I judge high school engineering projects at the Synopsys Science Fair and California State Science Fair, and have become quite skilled in BS detection. Aside from the usual methods to detect BS, the most revealing question in my experience has been "what problems did you run into while doing this project?" I ask this question to every student regardless of whether I think their project was BS or not, and the responses from legitimate students are usually sincere admissions of incompetence, while the response from a BSer is some inconsequential roadblock that they easily overcame. Students who are willing to submit a project where they did not produce the actual content will be willing to pawn off any experience or skill as their own, and will vastly overstate their abilities. The students who are humble about what they have accomplished and understand the full implications of their work are usually the ones who produce original work and win science fairs.

This year, I saw a project where a high school senior used deep power analysis and machine learning to break AES 128 on a microcontroller (https://instagram.com/p/0JzlxBoIaJ/). The student was from a prestigious private school, and the project required an expensive high-precision oscilloscope. Naturally I assumed that he had bought the project off eBay, so I didn't hold back in my questioning. But after I began questioning him, it quickly became clear that this was just an exceptionally bright mind who was willing to put hundreds of hours into deep understanding of a topic and reading the relevant research, before embarking on some original work of his own. He iterated over many possible solutions, and had an incredible demonstration of a working one. When I asked him difficult cryptography questions, he answered them precisely. And when I questioned him on his research methodology, he was humble in acknowledging his shortcomings and truthful in citing the research that guided certain aspects of his project. It is unfair to the exceptional few students capable of producing such a project to assume that all high school students are incapable of doing graduate-level research.

...or, you were fooled, and your methodology for BS detection isn't perfect.

I've seen, first-hand, kids who were coached to perfection at this sort of thing. And they could easily pass your test: one common pattern is for the kid to be handed a "project" that is pre-conceptualized and nearly complete, and have them do the last 5% of work in consultation with a senior researcher (typically a post-doc).

The kid basically flails around for a while, struggles a lot, and learns to talk the talk, but doesn't do much of anything in terms of productive work. So they'll struggle like crazy and hang around brilliant, hard-working people (and therefore be humbled and able to pass your test), but that doesn't mean they did the research.

Doing a research project end-to-end takes years of concerted effort. It's almost completely unrealistic to think that a high school senior has put in the time.

I get what you're saying. Think about it from the perspective of the dishonest student though - they're handed a project that does some amazing thing, and need to pass it off as their own work. Unless they have the domain knowledge around that amazing thing, they couldn't possibly have done the amazing thing, and science fair bullshitters are generally not willing to put in the time to get a deep understanding of the area their BS'd project is in. The student I mentioned had a deep knowledge of cryptography, and with that understanding and the knowledge of relevant scientific research, was able to build something new that did an amazing thing. But if he was handed that project, I doubt he would have the motivation to research crypto to the extent that he did, or be conversant with another person. And most importantly, he knew what he didn't know.

I've judged at the local school science fair in California, at the Intel ISEF a bunch of years ago, and I was also part of the organization that arranges the national science fair (Utstallningen Unga Forskare) in Sweden. Hence, I think I have some perspective on this topic.

The American science fairs are a completely different thing from what we did in Sweden. First, the Swedish one is strictly for 17-19 year olds. But more importantly, the Swedish one is not a competition -- the whole idea is that you do this voluntarily, because you have some project you are excited about, and because you get feedback about your project from real scientists.

What purpose does it serve to make it a competition? Isn't the idea to encourage the idea that science and engineering is fun and interesting? Making it a competition just serves to accentuate the issues mentioned in this article: giving an extreme advantage to kids who have access to professional equipment and personal mentoring.

And the whole thing about doing "original science" is ludicrous, especially when it's applied to middle school kids. What matters is whether the outcome is known to the student, not to the world. Kids engage in authentic inquiry every day, and whether the topic is "original science" or not matters not one bit.

If the choice is between the kid who investigated how different rubber bands shoot rocks of different sizes, but did it by his or herself vs. the one who was hand held through some fancy-sounding project at their parents lab, my choice will go to the former every time.

And yes, maybe there are super prodigies out there who actually mastered a research field enough to not only be able to do cutting edge research but also to know enough to pick a topic that is as high school students. I'm not worried about those kids, they don't need encouragement.

The Simpsons noticed this phenomenon and proposed a solution 20 years ago.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/79/78/1d/7978...

"And the award goes to the kids who clearly didn't have any help from their parents"

I'm right in the middle of this. I have two sons (11 and 8 yo).

Yesterday was the cub scouts Pinewood derby. The "kids" each build a 4-wheeled car out of a pinewood block. There are various rules that need to be adhered to. I resisted putting my stamp on the cars, but most of the cars in that derby looked like they were machined by Ferruccio Lamborghini. My kids' cars looked like someone had vomited on a block of pinewood. They did okay in the race, so that made me happy.

On the other hand, my 11 yo has an upcoming science fair at his elementary school. This time, I "became what I hate", because I helped him a little too much. I got lab equipment from work.

We're not doing anything fancy, but my "fingerprints" are all over it. He's making the poster, but I told him that the poster should contain his name and also state "with help from Dad."

I'll share my first science experiment that I was happy about. I came up with it in a college class, so well after my science fair days, but it might be something your kids could do.

There was pathway with a circular fountain in the middle. The path goes around the fountain. People have the choice of going left or going right. On the outside of the path are benches. My question was, will people avoid walking near someone sitting on the bench?

I still remember the numbers. I only measured it when a person was walking alone on the path. If no one sits then 90% of the people veer right to go around the fountain. (Clearly I want to re-do this in the UK.) When I sat on the bench on the right side, only 80% of the people would take the right. 10% of the people changed their path to avoid me, sitting on the bench, reading a book.

This is the sort of observational research that your eldest could easily do. Observational research the basis for a lot of research, though often overlooked in favor of flashier technology and lab equipment. The author of one book I read - I believe he was a field biologist - wrote that he gets asked how to encourage someone's child to get involved in science, and he suggests to buy a hand-held click counter. http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/revolving-doors/ is an example of how test which sign is the best way to get more people to use a revolving door than a regular door, with the goal of reducing the heating bill.

Down this way also lies eccentricities, like John Trinkaus, who won an IgNobel Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ig_Nobel_Prize_winners#... for publishing reports like "percentage of young people wear baseball caps with the peak facing to the rear rather than to the front". That's pure observational studies, with no experimental variable or control. It won't do well in a science fair.

Ha! I can relate to this. When I was a kid I lived in a town near a Boeing plant and several of the kids in the local troops had parents who were Boeing engineers. It quickly became apparent at race time who had access to an industrial wind-tunnel.

That wasn't a science fair, it was a geography pageant. This was a science fair:

Behold gravity, in all its glory!

http://37.media.tumblr.com/96643a967724c72c1b17bb0ef2d851c4/...

I feel like it's impossible for many people to acknowledge the fact that the world isn't fair.

To me, that's the basic assumption that you have to start with. Afterwords, you're free to figure out how to make things more fair, but if you don't start out understanding that things will always be messed up, you're left with a senseless rant.

From what I got through it seems like the author was upset that some parents can spend more time with their kids and that teachers were setting a high standard, and that wealth in families can function as a privilege for children. Those seem like pretty fundamental issues to me. The science fair is maybe like a microcosm of life that way, but I didn't get what was a problem unique to it.

On paper the kids do the work, but in practice, its more "what can they get away with".

I made it to the state region levels as a kid with a lame project, but I did it all myself, and I remember walking the aisles thinking to myself, "I can probably win against that kid, but there's no way I can win against that kid's Dad who obviously did all the work"

The pinewood Derby in scouts kind of suffers from a similar problem, "who's dad has the best woodworking shop"

This might be a useful life lesson, in that on a very large scale the first thing you learn in business, politics, law is whats right or legal doesn't matter, its all in what you can get away with and who your parents are, and the top players tend to be better at getting away with things and won the genetic lottery. A meritocracy ... of crooks. And that's an education all in itself that will provide a lifetime of benefits once understood at an early age. So I'm not necessarily seeing a problem with education kids.

That's not the sort of lesson I want kids to learn. Including my kids.

I want kids, including my kids, to learn that life is fair and if they don't see it be fair, they have to sit down and fix that.

I felt like the author not only decried projects where the kids have access to parental help, but projects where the kids have access to good facilities. And motivation. I'm not sure what's left to measure if we attempted to remove support, facilities, and motivation.

The author seems to support the idea that schools should provide more support and facilities. That sounds good, but the outcome of some schools doing this (the infamous ones near New York, apparently) seems to be the focus of criticism. I'm left not understanding the thrust of the article.

"I'm not sure what's left to measure if we attempted to remove support, facilities, and motivation."

Money? Unless that's filed under support.

Why bother with proxies and not just do bank accounts fair?

The whole idea of making children compete is questionable, and once you bring money in it completely loses reason to exist.

At the fairs I've gone to they compete on the written portion, and on how well they answer the question, i.e. how well they know the material.

The experiment itself doesn't matter as much.

I thought about this too. As a math graduate student, I've helped in programs aimed at helping gifted local high schoolers. It's not just me - several math graduate students and professors contribute.

I view this as an excellent opportunity to diffuse a better and deeper understanding, even enjoyment, of mathematics into the community. But I think the author of this article would view this as contributing to systemic unfairness and leading to an uneven playing field.

I agree, to a degree (we're all going to draw a different line in the sand on "fair").

Imagine a kid who has had the best environment possible: his parents were some kind of scientists, encouraged his interest in the same thing, and had access to the proper facilities. Another kid has parents that don't care about any kind of science, and were too poor to indulge his interest beyond letting him buy some books and lend them at the library.

If the first kid wins some prize over the other[1], it's not a prize saying "you did best given equal starting points". It just says that he did the best.

If you want to measure something other than skill in science X, like having the best willpower and drive irrespective of background and talent, then you should come up with another competition.

[1] And they both did the work themselves, to a reasonable degree. Not something that the parents did for them.

This quote shows something really bad, although it wasn't explicitly discussed:

"But at the three fairs I’ve attended over the last several years, the unknown rarely makes an appearance. At my son's fair last year, at least a handful of students did the popular "experiment" in which the "scientist" waters plants with three different liquids—one of which is typically soda or detergent—to determine which is best for plant growth.

"Were you surprised that water made the plant grow?" I asked one child after she presented her experiment.

"No," she said."

Aka "Science = boring and predictable and uncreative" Which is pretty much the opposite of reality, although a fairly accurate example of K12 science education...

Try harder kids? I put 10 seconds into it and got the idea of pond water, fresh chlorinated tap water, and collected rain water?

Then again, some decades ago I successfully won the local grade school with what boils down to a grid of detergents/soaps vs sources of dirt. (edited to highlite that dumb project ideas are not a recent invention of 2015, I mean think about it, a hypothesis that clothes detergent cleans dirt from cloth the best is lame, although what cleans kitchen grease was a good question, I think hand soap won?)

There is an interesting side dish of some fairs in some decades have allowed research projects or "inventions", which is pretty lame. Do science, do a book report, or do an art project, but don't confuse yourself into thinking the three activities are indistinguishable.

Yeah, they need to be encouraged to ask questions about what happens in their lives. Stuff that they genuinely care about.

For example, the other day I was peeing and though, "Is there less splatter by aiming my pee above the water line or below the waterline?" If I was Richard Feynman, I'd probably actually do an experiment. Now that may not be allowed in a school fair, but it's an example of a trivial everyday thing that one can wonder about, and design an experiment about, yet maybe hasn't been established as fact (like plants like water).

Below the waterline. All you need to do to learn this is pee with bare legs. ;p

> I put 10 seconds into it and got the idea of pond water, fresh chlorinated tap water, and collected rain water?

You would not see any effect, not with just 3 plants.

It's part of the problem - any effect obvious enough to show up with the small resources of a child, is also pretty obvious.

I would do different: Have kids reproduce famous known experiments, and get rid of this useless obsession with hypothesis first. Just do a "hey, that's interesting" type experiments.

True, would be a learning experience to break out some basic sampling theory (do 10 bean seeds not 1) and break out the digital calipers to get some precision rather than "eh looks bigger" Or... the kitchen dietary scale. I can go to 1/10th of gram on mine and that might work.

Also a stealth observation is the hidden assumption that a negative or null result means the experiment was a failure.

Personally I've got a gut feeling that given fertilizer runoff problems, the beans sprouts grown in pond water would grow faster unless the pond was unimaginably pristine. A bored kid could settle this interesting discussion via experiment... better than being stuck with "water, tide, or pepsi, which do plants crave??"

"Also a stealth observation is the hidden assumption that a negative or null result means the experiment was a failure."

I want to say that the "science" of the science fair is a sick parody of the real process of science, except the sick parody is itself now the real process.

One of the few things from grad school that still can cause me to momentarily crinkle my eyebrows in annoyance 12 years later is when I was in my machine learning class, and we were told to go use some automated decision tree learning software to go learn something from some data set. I deliberately chose a dataset and question that should have produced a null result, precisely to validate that the technique in question did in fact produce a null result. Despite the fact the professor completely agreed that I correctly converted the data, correctly formulated a hypothesis, correctly tested the hypothesis, and correctly determined the null hypothesis could not be discarded... I took a 50% deduction on the assignment. A thing that was ultimately irrelevant since I still got the max final grade in the course... what furrows my brow isn't the actual bad grade, but what it says about the mentality of what science is, even at that high level.

If that still doesn't sound scandalous to you... and it doesn't sound scandalous to a lot of people at first... consider the outcome if I had not chosen a data set that I expected to be null. Suppose I chose a data set that I expected to be able to learn something from, and I was wrong. (This happens a lot in the real world with real data, after all!) What does this mean? It means that 50% of my grade would have been dependent on me massaging the data until I did get a result. Yow! Real science should not be encouraging people to mine data until they get results like that. And one need not spend very long looking at how real science is done to see this idea is quite pervasive in "real science".

Real science is not compatible with the idea that a non-null result is "success" and a null result is "failure". Success and failure have to do with whether the result, whichever of those things it may be, correlates with reality. Ask a scientist this question directly and there's at least a decent chance they'll mouth words about how important the reality correlation is, but look to their actions and it's all "result = success".

I'm gonna be brutally honest here... my plan is that when the kids hit the science fair age, I'm going to tell them to just do what they need to do to get by, and explain to them what real science is. The two things are in direct conflict, and I'll take real science any day.

As a kid, I remember science fairs being an enjoyable time to run around a gymnasium learning about cool things with my friends and classmates. There were two projects that I actually remember vividly. One involved measuring distance using laser pens. The other was about how to make different sounds with wine glasses filled of water. If I dig deep into my memory, I think that I probably had one that involved plants, the light spectrum, a vinegar plus baking soda volcano, plus a few more that all probably came out of a science fair book I found in the library. The point is that none of them were scientifically ground breaking as say a new method for pancreatic cancer detection, but I still got almost perfect grades. I never did win any awards, certainly not any monetary ones, but I learned a considerable amount from the hands on experience.

Since that time, I've gone to a top 10 engineering school, have written research papers, and even have a patent. I'm applying for PhD programs now to study Artificial Intelligence, which I think is as noble a cause as any, and I haven't thought about my science fair experiences until reading this article.

My opinion on the science fair is that it should be more about playfulness and exploration than competition. After all, science should be a team effort rather than a battle royale, and we should worry more about helping one another than whether Sally won because her parent's helped her cut construction paper while Timmy was on his own.

If you are a parent worried that the science fair system is too corrupt, perhaps steer your child towards the rise of high school hackathons. I mentored high school students at MIT's Blueprint and was amazing to see high schoolers deploying machine learning solutions after less than 24 hours. The best part was that the hackathon itself was run by college students who are there to help any way they could, which could be one way to level the playing field.

I stopped reading when the author basically implied that making a trifold poster about whales was too much to ask of her third grader because it would require using the internet.

There are probably a lot of problems with science fairs, particularly at higher grade levels. But her example is pretty terrible.

My 2nd grade science fair project was making a book about the planets. I chose it because I thought space was cool.

All it involved was checking out space books from the school library and then putting a page for each planet in a binder with facts like how big the planet is or how far from the sun along with a hand drawn picture (ie a circle with moderately correct colors). I think there were some extra pages for the Sun and a random moon or two.

It could have easily been a trifold poster with most of the same stuff. I had loads of fun because I liked learning anything about space. It could have easily been about whales or something else if that's what I was interested in. But all it took was some help from the school librarian: "I want to do my science fair projects on planets. Do you have any books about planets?"

The next year I found a book of experiments in the school library and did one of them and explained it on a trifold. It was fun and not rocket science. I think most of the "experiments" in the book required stuff like rubber bands, paper, and straws.

I'm not clear why finding a few books in the school library and making a trifold poster is a headache for an elementary school student.

After that I never attended a school with a science fair, but I think it was perfectly reasonable the few years I did participate.

Given your child a book (or ebook I guess). Wow, just wow. Has the disappearance of things like encyclopedias increased the barrier of entry to knowledge?

Science fairs (or "Imagination Fairs" as they seem to be called) could be fun, but I get the feeling this is a lot of parents ruining something cool to be competitive.

I remember science fairs. I definitely had help from my parents and/or my partners parents. I don't think we ever won anything more than an honorable mention but the experience was really great. One time we did a soil erosion study looking at what kind of tiered mounds would erode less. The second one I forgot what the hypothesis was, but it got me and a friend to study blood and come to an understanding of clotting via platelets. My friends mom was a nurse and had us into the hospital to use the microscopes and take microscopic pictures of blood. The most fun was building an electric motor with my dad (RIP) out of nails and copper wire. I think the test was to see what manners of winding the wire would produce a faster motor. Nothing ground breaking. I'm sure we could have found the answers through study and not testing but it sure helped me grasp the concepts better. These were all elementary school projects and pretty rudimentary but it taught me that you are able to figure things out on your own. You don't necessarily need someone else to do it for you. Not an argument with the article really, just my own experience.

I remember what I learned from going to the state science fair in middle school:

how to fabricate results when the testing apparatus you built isn't sensitive enough to actually conduct the experiment.

I think science fairs could be greatly improved if they were more accepting of failed experiments.

The time I spent with my dad building a model of a turbofan jet engine - with real spinning blades - for our local science fair, is one of my fondest memories of him. And while it is true that he helped a lot we also did all the work together. Just sayin'.

This is why "bucket of bolts" competitions are better.

"The task is X. Here is the bucket of parts you are allowed to use. Build the best solution you can."

Given the current state of robotics, an alternative is: "Here is the robot. The task is X. Write the program to pull that off."

However, those kinds of competitions require way more work on the part of the organizers.

I was going to put it all in one comment, but I wasn't sure what the HN character limit was.

This was rather timely, for me. I have been struggling with the assumption that my daughter's science fair was due to me, rather than her. I was very proud of her work/effort, and wanted to share that with friends/family, but many of the reactions were, essentially, "well, it was really you who won". And that couldn't be further from truth.

Now, one reason, I assume for this reaction, is due to two things: 1) they know I'm science nerd (I have a degree in physics), and 2) she's really young, but won for the whole school (she's in the second grade, and won 1st place for the school, and her own grade). They say this, without even knowing what she did or how she did it. To me, the entire point of the fair is to get kids AND parents involved in science, while exposing kids to the scientific process. So, to me, I get my daughter to do as much of her project as she can. And even things she can't do, I still get her to try, even when it takes her a long time (like typing her slides that get glued to her board - she types with one finger pecking very slowly). But she loved the work, and felt like she was learning something. Her experiment was incredibly simple (literally a cup of water and a timer), and she thought of the procedure herself, and the question she wanted to answer was hers.

But, even after I explain this to someone, they still feel my daughter was unfairly advantaged, or at the very least, was given some better than average coaching, because of my background/experience. To a certain extent, I kind of agree on that point. I do try really hard to explain the concepts to her in a way that an 8 year old can understand. But, ultimately, it all comes down to her. The idea and experiment were hers.

When I walked the gym and saw the other experiments/projects, many were highly decorated and beautiful (my daughter's had no decoration, just a title and the required sections with text in her own words). And many experiments had rather elaborate processes, and/or complex devices. Sadly, I too thought that many parents were at work, rather than the kids, even knowing how much I made my daughter do on her own. But it all seems to come down to the kids. And, some here have mentioned, the judges are pretty good at detecting BS. So although a perusal of the fair wouldn't make it obvious which kids did their own work, or how much they really learned, and that's where the assessment of the judges has to be taken into account.

And it was that that made me feel better about my daughter's work. I was proud of her, because I knew that it was she who did it, and was glad the judges were able to see it. But I totally know that many parents do over-involve themselves to the point the kids don't learn anything. It seems a difficult balance to strike, but it does seem possible to distinguish the extremes.

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