Science Fairs Aren't So Fair

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.

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.

Very spot on.

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.

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.