
It May Be a Sputnik Moment, but Science Fairs Are Lagging - timr
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/us/05science.html?hpw
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Jach
> In middle school, science fair projects are typically still required — and,
> teachers lament, all too often completed by parents. And some high schools
> funnel their best students into elite science competitions that require
> years of work and lengthy research papers: a few thousand students enter
> such contests each year.

Making them required makes them dull; the types of projects available to
students without the "elite" (in my opinion, potentially worthy) status are
also pretty dull. For my forced science project I tried to get away with doing
something with potatoes and electricity, but the teacher said I should do
something in programming instead so I did something or another about various
benchmarks and controlling for caching... useless, but got me a grade and
didn't consume my time.

Do parents still really do projects? I thought the "chili volcano done by Dad"
has been consigned to sitcoms.

> But what has been lost, proponents of local science fairs say, is the
> potential to expose a much broader swath of American teenagers to the
> scientific process: to test an idea, evaluate evidence, ask a question about
> how the world works — and perhaps discover how difficult it can be to find
> an answer.

There's another set of classes that can do this far more effectively than a
science project where most entries are BS and uninteresting (I have nothing
against the interesting ones, a guy at my high school did some work with MEMS
which was pretty cool, he had the best project of the whole district at
least). That set of classes is programming. Every time you run the program,
you're testing your hypothesis that it works. Errors give you evidence of what
is causing the problem, which leads you to question how the computer works and
how to get your program to work. More focus on everyone having a "Basic
Programming Literacy" seems a lot more useful than funding the multitudes of
BS science fair projects.

A quick comment on why I think so many science fair projects are BS... If it's
not worth trying to independently replicate results later, it's not useful
science. And in the same vein, if it's been replicated a hundred times, it's
probably better to look at something else. (No more potatoes-generate-
electricity or chili-volcano projects!)

The solar powered car they showed Obama examining looked pretty cool, I'm all
for more projects of that sort (unless it's just a reimplementation of a
solved engineering class project). Instead of trying to prop up the current
faulty system of science fairs, we should create a new system dedicated to
producing useful science (where a three-panel poster board isn't required).

