1. Just generic stuff. Growing plants with something different in the soil/water, what shape of balsa wood makes the strongest structure, etc

2. You were taken under the wing of the science teacher, were given better ideas which were encouraged, got to use some equipment from the school, that sort of thing.

3. The highest tier, one of your parents was a biologist, engineer or chemist at one of the local big companies, you did some very specialized research, were able to use some very fancy equipment, etc. These kids almost always seemed to have the best chance of winning.

There's far too many adults that don't seem to grasp the basic principles of what the discipline of science is.

At the earliest level instead they should be replaced with kids having to come up with experiments to either show something is or is not real based on an existing demonstration.

For instance, I'll make the claim that each different color of Trix has a unique flavor. And that you can test this because when you eat a certain color you always taste the same flavor. Then the kids will have to come up with experiments that show that although that is true, the claim that they are flavored differently is false.

Another example. I'll claim that a tall slender glass holds more liquid then a short and narrow one of equal volume and as evidence I'll show that companies charge more for the tall and slender and people pay more for it willingly.

Essentially you start out with something where the response is "that's true but," and then an experiment is constructed from there.

This approach allows for some important lessons.

1. You don't have to successfully explain the phenomena to demonstrate the claim is false.

2. That science is about skepticism until you're forced to accept something essentially by exhaustion of objections

3. That poorly constructed tests can reproduce a phenomena that you're trying to isolate, etc.

The change is to not make it open ended or have projects or theme fairs. No posterboards or presentations.

Instead it's a form of debate club with interlocutors where groups are trying to fake and fool the others and separate things

When the general public accuses people of putting their "trust in science" I mean, this will kill that. No, science is all about strong methodological distrust - that's one of the basic premises.

Most education as delivered is uninterested in whether the recipients learn anything. I remember reading an essay by someone who gave a presentation at an education conference...

He wrote that a schoolteacher came up to him afterwards, excited about his talk. She wanted his opinion on her favorite part of the school year: each of her students gave an oral presentation on a theme that she assigned. She was proud of this assignment, because (a) she enjoyed watching the presentations, and (b) the students liked doing them.

And I was appalled to read this, because I consider those presentations a fancy form of abuse, and they're obviously worthless. But the essay author said:

"I am not going to tell you what I think. Instead, I want to ask you two questions:

First, can you imagine someone knowing the material of your class well, but doing poorly on the presentation?

Second, can you imagine someone doing well on the presentation, but not knowing the material?"

And the teacher grew very quiet.

I did the science fair circuit growing up from 7th through 12th grade, then coached HS students on projects when I was in college. Today I'm a judge for ISEF, which is happening shortly.

Frankly, the whole scene is a bit done by 12th grade, so I'm not really sure this person has enough experience doing fairs to say what's broken about them and how to fix them. It's really a middle school to early high school thing; if you're starting in senior year most of the best students are already set with results they will use to apply to colleges, so they stop doing fairs in senior year. 8,9,10 is the real heat.

It's also not the common case that a student is placed in a research lab and works on in-progress research, you see all kinds of students doing varied projects. I judge the CS field and yeah you get projects which are essentially "Me and my dad built a PC" (although I've never seen a volcano project). Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel. Some of them have a giant board with binders upon binders upon binders and it's clear the kid was coached and worked at his mom's lab. The "consumer science" category of the fair grows every year.

But really no matter what, I find this to be true of all students at the fair:

> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer.

All the kids exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. Some of them are only capable of doing experiments that come in a box, but they're still curious. So I don't really know what the author is trying to say with this article. Is there actually a problem, and if so how bad is it? I'm all for changing up the science fair and evolving it and doing a new format, but I don't think they're especially lacking in innovative spirit as the author implies.

Obviously, geniuses exist, but I was still skeptical.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01425-4

If the problem in that paper is not addressed, any kind of DEI in academia is hollow, e.g. "if you are black and your parents are professors you get 500 job offers."

It is very hard to make any progress in this area because there is a lot of demand for status to be hereditary and the more strident anyone is about "meritocracy" the more concerned they are that people in powerful roles are perceived to be deserving of them and the less concerned that talented people find opportunity.

I remember one being how fast bean sprouts grew when watered with different liquids (Water, Olive Oil, Wine, Coke, ect). An idea a kid came up with and tested with only minimal help from parents.

To me they should be about exploring independent ideas. I love the Adam Savage quote: "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down". To me this is what they should capture.

> Of course, working with cruder tools, limited patience, and air resistance, many of us didn’t wind up squarely on 9.8 m/s^2. One of my partners was quick to scribble out our actual observation, and she and I had a brief struggle over control of the pencil as she attempted to put in the “correct” answer. She had a better sense of the teacher’s intentions than I did. The tables that honestly reported a “wrong” result were encouraged to repeat their experiment until they got a trial that “worked.” We missed the chance to talk about how scientists reconcile noisy data. We missed the chance to run an experiment for the purpose of exploring the unknown.

> Students in science fairs and adults in professional labs know the answer they’re supposed to get.

Huh. I always hated being compelled to participate in school science fairs and school science labs, but it wouldn't have occurred to me that this was a problem. It's obvious that you're going to have measurement errors. That's an expected part of every lab. As it was presented in every single science class, the point is to respond to your own measurement errors by including a discussion of why your numbers might be different than expected. ("My ruler was not graded below a resolution of one centimeter.")

I cannot stand the science lab approach of "Here's a description of an experiment that you cannot reproduce. Try anyway, and then write up a lab report pretending that you accomplished something."

But I would kind of like a lab along the lines of "Here are some primitive tools. See how close you can get to measuring [quantity X]."

Sadly, that is excellent preparation for the job of an academic scientist today. Performing at a high level is inextricably linked with self promotion in this system, all the way to the top.