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January 13, 2017 3:03 PM   Subscribe

"Occasionally I judge science fairs & while the scientific questions aren't always super novel, I get a kick out of kid scientist logic..."
posted by griphus (43 comments total) 39 users marked this as a favorite
 
I would like to test 20+ local dogs on treat preferences
posted by Countess Elena at 3:07 PM on January 13, 2017 [16 favorites]


(If you're not terribly familiar with Twitter, the "show more" button at the end of the photos will load more kid scientist photos, not just conversations.)
posted by griphus at 3:10 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


In high school, some genius thought my best friend Jon and I would be good grade-school science fair judges. Hey, we were good at math and science, seemed like nice kids, and how could they possibly know we were ridiculously high the moment school let out.

I'm just going to say we were a bit biased to the kids who made ocean waves in a bottle and volcano experiments...the messier the better.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:16 PM on January 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


Ok seriously- my absolute favorite was the methodology for testing dog treat preference with strangers dogs. "Ask first". . Too cute!
posted by Suffocating Kitty at 3:22 PM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


"Ask if it's OK" on the dog one is great. Sure, it wouldn't pass an IRB, but I am definitely in favor of any young researcher acknowledging and dealing with ethical and consent issues in their study.
posted by jackbishop at 3:24 PM on January 13, 2017 [40 favorites]


Oh, these are just amazing. The sponge results graph near the bottom is fantastic. WET WET WET
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 3:25 PM on January 13, 2017 [11 favorites]


Oh. Wow. griphus, all day I have been watching my Twitter notifications spiral out of control thinking "RIP my menchies," albeit at a much smaller (for now) scale.

Judging science fairs is a blast; everyone who enjoys this stuff should give it a shot. I love to ask the kids about what they'd try if they had more time or money to do a second round of experiments, but yesterday we evaluating posters without the kids present, so I was able to take a few pictures instead.
posted by deludingmyself at 3:35 PM on January 13, 2017 [27 favorites]


Wow, kindergarten science fairs? I am completely torn between 'that's awesome!' and 'that's terrible!'
posted by the agents of KAOS at 3:49 PM on January 13, 2017 [10 favorites]



I enjoyed this so much that I just finished looking to see if there are any science fairs around here. The county one is in April and is now on my calendar. I figure it would be interesting, entertaining as well as a way to show kids support for science and critical thinking which right now seems extra important to do.
posted by Jalliah at 3:49 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Years ago my parents judged a science fair where one of the kids researched the milk-soaking properties of various brands of cookies. My parents suggested that his methodology might be more subjective than objective, and that he could get better results if he redesigned his test. "You mean I can test MORE cookies?!" That's right, kid. Do it for Science!
posted by Orange Dinosaur Slide at 3:50 PM on January 13, 2017 [13 favorites]


I've only done a few of these, two here in CO. Last year was at magnet middle school in a district with a high poverty rate, where the students clearly had had fewer resources and less parental involvement than this fair. Consequently, their teachers had directed them all to a website of science fair ideas during school hours, and then many of the kids had latched on to the same questions for their projects. (We judged a LOT of balloon cars that day.) But the level of scientific thinking was still very impressive, when you started asking kids about what they'd do next. This one kid who'd trained his dogs to search for hidden treats to evaluate whether small or large dogs (n=2) have better search strategies spent a while talking talking to me about how he really needed to blind his study, because the smaller dog kept watching while the bigger dog searched out treats. Another kid built some sweet light-up gloves for nighttime cycling safety, and then tapped his dad & cousin to test them out in a field trial.

Also they all had tiny lab coats and it was adorable.
posted by deludingmyself at 4:03 PM on January 13, 2017 [40 favorites]


I went to a small preK - 12th grade school where my mom taught, so as an elementary school kid I'd go after hours to get a first, private look at the middle school science fair projects. (That's the situation that led to me almost setting the school on fire that one time, but that's not this story.) This is the story of the time I was the first to notice that one student wrote "shit" on his science fair project. Right there! In front of everyone! The word shit! ON HIS SCHOOLWORK!

The display wasn't very good, it was just a regular piece of poster paper that had been folded in thirds, not one of those corrugated triptych things, and everything on it was written by hand in horribly sloppy handwriting. The project was finding out what type of food attracted birds to a feeder better--bird seed alone, bird seed in peanut butter, or bird seed in ... shit. I was probably in second or third grade at the time and was conflicted. As a teacher's kid I had seen firsthand what kind of havoc a publicly written swear word could cause, but I also didn't want to get the student in trouble, he was going to have a hard enough time getting a good grade on the project as it was.

So I walked down the hall to the chemistry lab to get the cool science teacher and explain the problem to him, and of course he came right away to investigate. He looked at it, laughed, and said, "well he obviously didn't get any help from his parents on this," and kept laughing. I assumed he was laughing because poop is funny, so I started laughing, too.

Friends, the word was suet.
posted by phunniemee at 4:21 PM on January 13, 2017 [51 favorites]


I used to help judge kid science fairs as part of a research project I worked for. These pics are all very familiar!

My big peeve though is the doing a demonstration not an experiment. But my research was all about kid experimental design so it got kind of personal. You're lowering my ns here kids!
posted by soren_lorensen at 4:29 PM on January 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


"I say Samurai and Genki and not cats, because I do not know if it only did not work on them or if it will not work on all cats."

This elementary school student is already overqualified to be a practicing scientist.

I would still recommend that they enter the field, but only if they can find collaborators to handle peripheral tasks like "writing competitive grant proposals" and "talking to science reporters without your thoughts turning to violence".
posted by roystgnr at 4:35 PM on January 13, 2017 [20 favorites]


My big peeve though is the doing a demonstration not an experiment.

Demonstration-based science is the main reason I didn't connect with science that much until high school. When you're a bright fourth grader, you know damn well what sinks and floats already. (Metals: sink! Corks: float! Paper: sinks and then floats! Oh my god, when can I go read more C. S. Lewis in the reading nook?) You don't need to spend an entire class period trying it and writing it down, and the whole exercise seems silly.

If a science teacher had been able to tap my competitive nature, though ("prove you're right"), I'd have been all in.
posted by deludingmyself at 4:36 PM on January 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


I used to get kind of annoyed about the science fair because they'd talk about how you have to prove something and id be like um hello I'm 10 and I don't have the resources to prove shit - I have nothing to work with and you haven't even taught me how to do anything. Anyway the exhibits that were obviously done by parents always always won.
posted by bleep at 4:48 PM on January 13, 2017 [12 favorites]


"science fair" is one of those things that you hear about in books/on tv all the time and I totally totally wanted to participate in one and never did because my elementary/high schools didn't have them.
posted by quaking fajita at 5:02 PM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


"science fair" is one of those things that you hear about in books/on tv all the time and I totally totally wanted to participate in one and never did because my elementary/high schools didn't have them.

Me too! So I made a science closet when I was in elementary school. I had a small walk in closet with shelves on one side and close rack on the other. I put a little table in there, a desk lamp and had one shelf beside my desk to store all the books I would get from the library. I would 'study' things and make posters and drawings that I'd stick to the wall and design my own science experiments.
posted by Jalliah at 5:18 PM on January 13, 2017 [34 favorites]


I made a science closet when I was in elementary school

This is the most adorable thing. The most.
posted by deludingmyself at 5:33 PM on January 13, 2017 [7 favorites]


and the most tasty thing eva!!
posted by shockingbluamp at 5:57 PM on January 13, 2017


If I can get "some numbers were smaller, some numbers were bigger" into a work report this year, I'll consider 2017 not a complete bust.
posted by mhum at 6:20 PM on January 13, 2017 [15 favorites]


My son's K-2 school has an "optional" science fair every spring. It's not judged, which I think is appropriate at this age. But...my wife and I are both research scientists and work with tons of cool stuff, and we did pretty good in the science fair back in our day, so... By the time
he gets to high school he will be that kid using 2p microscopy and whatever molecular biology tool that gets invented in the next 10
years.
posted by mbd1mbd1 at 6:23 PM on January 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I was really into science fairs when I was a kid. I don't think the requirements to judge one were very strict.

A couple years ago I saw a flyer taped up in a coffee shop looking for volunteers to judge the science fair at one of the local schools. Oh, that might be interesting since I did so many science fairs and "work in computers." Er, no - they wanted to see only CVs that included post-doctoral work. I don't think it was a joke.
posted by lagomorphius at 6:28 PM on January 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


shockingbluamp: "and the most tasty thing eva!!"

Would.
posted by Samizdata at 7:23 PM on January 13, 2017


Some schools JUDGE science fairs??

Shoot, my fifth grade had a science fair and we all just....did science. It was just like this, each of us all earnest with our folded cardboard displays on card tables in the gym and stuff, with everyone's parents walking around and looking at things and we would be standing there to show off stuff, but there were no prizes, it was just like a mass show-and-tell kind of thing.

And thank god too, because I had an experiment designed to show about how clouds are caused by changes in air pressure, and the demonstration involved pumping air into a gallon jug with a bike pump and then covering the hole quick, and I think there was something in the water that just made it condense faster than usual. But after maybe ten minutes I got tired and couldn't get the pump to work and I had to keep asking Mikey M at the booth next to me to do it for me. I'd have lost that fair but hard.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 7:48 PM on January 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


This thread just made me dig out my son's first science fair tri-fold display (from kindergarten, he's now 14 years old)... his hypothesis, inspired by the lyrics to TMBG's "Meet The Elements", was that he would squeeze carbon into a diamond:
Carbon in its ordinary form is coal
Crush it together, and diamonds are born


I went and bought him some charcoal, and we tightened it into our workbench vise overnight. I remember checking with him the next morning, how excited he was to behold his diamond, and the disappointment when he found only carbon powder.

He then thought that maybe we needed to squeeze it harder and longer; we sandwiched some charcoal between some boards and I parked our old 2+ ton Land Cruiser on top of it for a couple of days. Much excitement and anticipation--no diamond.

His conclusion, with many hand-drawn stars in the margins: "We tried it in two different ways and we still did not make any diamonds. We would need very much heavier things to make a diamond. I love diamonds so much."
posted by rodeoclown at 7:48 PM on January 13, 2017 [39 favorites]


One year I decided to build a cloud chamber to track atomic decay so my dad got some dry ice and put it in a cooler and brought it to me at recess on the day of the science fair but he brought way more than the experiment required so Doug Ferguson and I went to the cafeteria and put the remainder into all the pitchers of tea that sat on every table in the cafeteria and we both got suspended

I regret nothing

Fog boiling off all those long tables and filling the cafeteria knee-deep is one of my fondest high school memories
posted by BitterOldPunk at 8:08 PM on January 13, 2017 [31 favorites]


In high school one year, the state debate tournament was split between adjacent high and middle schools in Topeka or Wichita or something and I got to hang out in a hallway and read all the fourth grade science projects, where they'd all tested various plant-growing hypotheses. My favorite two were "the plant that grows the fastest will grow the fastest" and "the plant that gets chocolate milk will grow faster than the plant that gets regular milk" (you're not fooling your parents, kid)

Also I debated in room where a huge goddamn turtle was just wandering around at my feet
posted by dismas at 8:30 PM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


These are adorable.

My siblings and I went to schools that required science projects every year from kindergarten through 8th grade and assumed a lot of parent support in getting them done; very little of the brainstorming, planning, research or work happened at school. We were all good students but none of us were particularly great long-term planners or terribly inspired by the science fair process, which meant there was always a good deal of last-minute panic, grade anxiety and angst involved in getting one out the door.

There are five of us and we are all two grades apart which further meant that there was one year my mother had to supervise and assist with five separate science fair projects. She was involved in 4 for several years and had, that is right you read it here first, 17 straight years of forced march participation in the science fair projects of her grouchy children.

I teach smart, occasionally cranky middle schoolers and I am trembling just thinking about what she did.
posted by charmedimsure at 8:57 PM on January 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


My mother let me order Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches from the internet in middle school for my science fair project; there is no greater love.
posted by foxfirefey at 9:49 PM on January 13, 2017 [6 favorites]


These are delightful.

I've been a judge at a dozen or so middle school and high school science fairs. In every case, I've been impressed both by the complete lack of correlation between the money and resources spent on a project and its quality, and by the thoughtful care that teachers and judges put into evaluations. Of all the reasons I'm hopeful for the future, two of the most convincing are the teachers who go out of their way to point out the constraints specific students faced in carrying out their projects and the kick-ass students who do actual science using onions and match sticks and then present their results on paper stapled to cardboard box remnants. That they often win over the kids who borrow $5K IR cameras from their parent's labs is also remarkable. (It doesn't always happen; but it's rare that the most resource-intensive project wins.) If you need a hit of optimism, judge a science fair. Two thirds of the kids are clearly just phoning it in (which, to be fair, is how I treated English assignments) but the effort and insights of the rest will make your heart sing.

The one thing that has always annoyed me, though, is the formulaic insistence on "the scientific method." Unless you happen to work in one of the very specific disciplines where explicit hypothesis-testing actually happens (e.g., medical trials), the scientific method stopped being a useful model for understanding science right around the time Simplicio lost his dialogues. 80% of modern science is engineering (or applied math, or computer science), and 80% of the rest takes the form, "we built an instrument / looked in a place / measured a thing that nobody had done before. Here's what we found."

But, textbooks and teachers insist that all science requires a hypothesis. So you get absurdly contorted constructs: "We hypothesized that we would be able to build a bridge that could hold five pounds" and "we hypothesized that if we examined pond water under a microscope I would be able to see neat things," and "we hypothesized that putting baking soda and vinegar into a muddy pot hole would look like a volcano." (To be fair, the last one probably deserved scorn no matter how its phrased.)

The kids know it's bullshit. The judges know it's bullshit. I hope and want to believe that the teachers know it's bullshit. Why do we bother to go through the dance? I've spent my entire adult life as a working scientist in a field fairly far from anything you might call "applied," and except when grading science fair projects I've never used the word "hypothesis" in a professional context. I'll be very surprised if I ever use the word in a paper.

What makes a thing science rather than not-science? It sure as hell isn't the question, "did you formulate a hypothesis before making your measurement?" Or, at least, it very rarely has anything to do with that. More useful are, "is the result repeatable," "is it significant," "did you control for other factors," and perhaps "is there a predictive model that explains the result and is consistent with other knowledge?" Sure, verifying results and verifying the predictive power of scientific theories is important. But, it's a tiny part of the actual practice of science and an even smaller part of the actual practice of science fair projects. Pretending otherwise just feels slimy.
posted by eotvos at 10:13 PM on January 13, 2017 [17 favorites]


I used to use the scientific method when I was a writing tutor in college, it makes way more sense as a method for writing English papers. Come up with a hypothesis about the thing, do background research, try to find stuff in the thing and in your research that agree, and voila you made a point.
posted by bleep at 11:12 PM on January 13, 2017 [9 favorites]


I thought it would be fun to be a science fair judge a few years back, and I figured I'd volunteer at the local highschool when I heard they were looking for help. My physics degree is admittedly largely a wall decoration these days, but I had always fancied myself a decent enough experimentalist, did some time in the trenches as a undergrad lab TA, figured I'd seen a few sketchy Millikan oil-drop setups in my time; I said I'd be happy to judge physics, and maybe electronics if they needed someone extra.

I was politely but very firmly turned down because I don't have a PhD and any relevant recent publications, and that's sort of a baseline qualification for this sort of thing.
posted by Kadin2048 at 12:40 AM on January 14, 2017


"Conclusion: I was right!"

I'm stealing this.
posted by bibliowench at 5:28 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


The science teacher was frustrated because she had gone over and over and over and over and over and over and over how the students needed to come up with a hypothesis, and a way to test it, and then come up with conclusions based on the evidence. The science teacher was frustrated because a majority of the class came in with volcanoes and models of the universe

Being able to design a controlled experiment is surprisingly difficult for many children. The logic it involves (controlling variables to determine whether a single variable is causal) is really frustratingly difficult to teach to students who don't grasp it instinctively (or because their parents are scientists and they grew up hearing about it).

Source: I worked on a research study for nearly a decade that was solely dedicated to determining better ways to teach underprivileged middle schoolers this logic. Most have a much more instinctive grasp on engineering strategies, and this seems to be more of a basic human orientation: try some stuff to make the best thing. It's a lot harder to teach kids to stop worrying about making the best thing and instead just try to prove that this one thing causes a change in these other things. I tutored literal hundreds of kids on this topic and the number who went from totally not getting it to totally getting it was really, really small. My dad is a professor of philosophy of science and he reports that in his large undergrad courses there are still a percentage who really do not understand simple experimental design.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:52 AM on January 14, 2017 [7 favorites]


Bleep, I'm totally with you on the "I'm a kid, I can't test shit" thing. I remember a third grade class where we were supposed to invent something, and I built something kind of like part of the game Mousetrap and was frustrated because it didn't work as I wanted it to and I knew I didn't have the skills to figure out how to make it work.

That one kid's refusal to generalize beyond her own two cats suggests a great teachable moment to me for frustrated kids, who I suspect are really common (someone mentioned "they all know it's bullshit," and I think that's part of that feeling -- the kids aren't just jaded, their assessment of what they can do is not unreasonable). I hope the teacher or judge pointed out that knowing how your research can and can't generalize, particularly when it comes to animal or human behavior research, is an important part of being a grown-up scientist. It's also hugely important to scientific literacy (think hyperbolic science journalism).

It strikes me that it may be important to probe for whether kids are frustrated along these lines, as it may just look like they're disengaged. They may not talk about their awareness that they aren't up to Real Science standards unless they're asked.
posted by gusandrews at 8:02 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


I hope the teacher or judge pointed out that knowing how your research can and can't generalize, particularly when it comes to animal or human behavior research, is an important part of being a grown-up scientist.

So true. I missed grabbing a picture of the poster where a third grader studying what affects freezing rates of liquids concluded "I'm not sure if my hypothesis was testable or not with this setup." But I left a long, encouraging note on that kid's form, because that kind of "aw shit, I don't know what this tells us" non-result is so common in the process of doing everyday science.
posted by deludingmyself at 8:13 AM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


Yes now that I'm grown it's really striking - when I was that too-smart too-anxious little kid I thought there was way more being asked of me than there ever was.
posted by bleep at 11:22 AM on January 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


I did an experiment once I'd lost enough baby teeth, to determine the amount of tooth decay from water, milk, and Dr Pepper. However, I somehow missed the mixing that was occurring in the milk and water with Dr Pepper since I was using the same spoon to stir the teeth in the liquids.
You should not be surprised to learn that Dr Pepper rots your teeth.

4th grade science fair, my hypothesis was that all pizza was equally good. I experimented by having my parents order our weekly Wednesday night pizza from a different pizza place in town for a couple months running. My conclusion: 4th graders should not force their families to eat crappy pizza for science. The real fun of that experiment was that my dad offered to take my blurbs for my posterboard in to work to get them typed up for me. Unfortunately, he typed them himself instead of having his secretary do it. I got points off my grade for all the typoes.

5th grade GTE science fair, my hypothesis was that if I mixed together a bunch of foods that tasted good, the result would also taste good. However, I limited my "ingredients." If I recall, I mixed in various combinations: fluff, peanut butter, graham crackers, Nilla Wafers, oreos, chocolate syrup, caramel sauce, and butterscotch pudding. My conclusion was along the lines of YASSSSSSSSS.
posted by The Almighty Mommy Goddess at 12:18 PM on January 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


It sure as hell isn't the question, "did you formulate a hypothesis before making your measurement?" Or, at least, it very rarely has anything to do with that. More useful are, "is the result repeatable," "is it significant," "did you control for other factors," and perhaps "is there a predictive model that explains the result and is consistent with other knowledge?"

But with regards to the first question there and the last, isn't the difference between "hypothesis" and "predictive model" merely one of scale?
posted by radwolf76 at 2:19 PM on January 14, 2017


I put together a science fair project dealing with coat color in mice. Unfortunately, my limited grasp of genetics and multiple factors affecting coat color didn't lead to much in the way of results.

But, oh my! There were a lot of mice!
posted by BlueHorse at 3:38 PM on January 14, 2017 [4 favorites]


very little of the brainstorming, planning, research or work happened at school.

I also was required to do science projects from 5th grade thru high school. The one in the 5th grade was terrifying. We did have quite a lot of support in school, with weekly sessions in small groups where we had to talk about our progress and also for time to work on things - good thing because my parents were not the people I would ever learn anything from about long term planning from. But like I said, the scale of the work and the long term nature and that people would *look* at it at the end - I was soooooo stressed. I remember mulling about it on the bus, just *worrying *. One day, I thought to myself, 'this is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. I'm *going * to get this done and then I'll know I can always get hard stuff done.'. I did finish it and I was proud of the work. I'm now a scientist and project manager, and when work stuff gets hairy, I still return to that time of stress and remind myself that if I got through that, I can definitely get this PowerPoint presentation for a big talk made on time and looking good.
posted by Tandem Affinity at 7:41 PM on January 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


One year one of the quietest girls in my Sunday school class ended up being remembered forever by entering an experiment in the local science fair that was basically a rotting steak sitting in an aquarium with a very loose lid. She called it "The Fly Farm".
posted by lagomorphius at 4:26 PM on January 15, 2017 [5 favorites]


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