
Science fairs are as flawed as my solar-powered hot dog cooker - CrocodileStreet
https://www.statnews.com/2016/04/13/science-fairs-white-house/
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AlexandraLeigh
Good analysis , I was enlightened by the insight ! Does anyone know where my
company could obtain a fillable a form document to fill in ?

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jerf
"The only reason Veronica was able to carry out her experiment was that I had
the flexibility to spend hours struggling through paperwork, and because I had
a social network of scientists I’ve developed as a science writer. This was an
exercise in privilege."

No, it was an exercise in barriers. Everybody [1] has enough "privilege" to do
this experiment, by which I mean the experiment itself without the "fair"
elements, with little more than a slightly-interested science teacher. They
just aren't allowed to do it by the science fair. Being able to speak with
"actual" scientists about counting bacteria is at most a slight bonus; it is
not necessary to the process, learning about it by reading would be a fine
education on its own, and even failing at the process would be educational in
its own way, as the author describes in his own experiences. (Science fairs
have a major role to play in the pernicious idea that science is only
"successful" when it obtains the positive result the experimenter was looking
for... but that's a separate rant.)

This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is
regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs. If
"privilege" issues were as easy as just _removing_ some regulation, we
probably wouldn't be talking about it so much.

[1]: Everyone plausibly within the scope of this article, anyhow, which is
places that have science fairs at all. That would be a separate issue.

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panglott
Being coached by professional microbiologists in a working lab is not really
an advantage?

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jerf
Just to confirm, uremog is getting my point. No, it really isn't an advantage.
It would be an advantage if one were doing an experiment that required access
to a particular strain of cells or really specialized equipment or specialized
knowledge, but this particular experiment is none of the above. And even to
the extent that it may help, the science fair is a time to _not use it!_ A
great deal of the point of such activities is to show how _anybody_ can use
the scientific methods to learn things. If you take your student to a high-
tech lab to do their high-tech experiment on high-tech equipment, you're just
_further reinforcing_ the idea that Science is a Thing done by Scientists and
I Can't Do It Myself.

If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge
something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any
student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they
took the time.

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function_seven
> If I were running a science fair, a rock-solid requirement for me to judge
> something as the winner would be a plausible argument that pretty much any
> student could replicate the experiment with school-level resources, if they
> took the time.

I thought the point of this article was that Veronica was specifically told
she _couldn 't_ do this experiment as you describe:

    
    
        We also learned that this experiment was so potentially dangerous that Veronica
        would have to carry it out under the supervision of a trained expert, who would
        first have to submit a detailed risk assessment.
    

That she wanted to do it the simple way, but the school said, "No, you're not
allowed to. We're too afraid"

I feel like I'm confusing something somewhere.

~~~
jerf
I am being critical of that. The more I think through this, the stronger I
come to the conclusion that this whole thing is of negative value, actively
subverting the only goals that matter, and it might as well be shut down. This
whole thing is a useless farce.

As long as we're discussing privilege, the _correct_ use of privilege would be
to tell the school to just go to hell, run the experiment anyhow with the
probably $10 of equipment you need, and submit something to the actual science
fair as perfunctory as possible that will let you pass (leaning on your
"privilege" to pass). And skip the visits to the microbiologists, because that
proves the _wrong_ point. You _should_ be doing this on your own.

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garrickvanburen
My kids' school, to some degree, solved this with "Creativity Fairs". You want
to design and sew a dress? Cool. You want to scale up Thor's hammer from
action figure size to your size? Cool. You want to recreate Fallingwater in
SketchUp? Cool. There were even a few more traditionally science-y projects.

As long as it doesn't include food or live animals - you're cool.

~~~
asimuvPR
My niece's school did that too. It was _unexpected_ but absolutely enjoyable.
They had the older grades build fake companies around made up science-y
products. The aim was to get people to "buy" the product by pitching it. To be
honest, some of the products reminded me of some startups mentioned in HN. One
kid even had a food delivery service with drones... My niece's grade go to
build rovers and satellites. She built hers to something between voyager and
sputnik. It even had "engines" that would light up (LEDs). Really fun event
without the pressure of trying to look smart.

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PaulHoule
It's pretty notorious that science fairs are a venue for "achievement
laundering", particularly when you see how many winners are professor's kids,
upper upper middle class or otherwise privileged.

The U.S. is starting to get as bad as Heian Japan -- where the obsession of
aristocrats on maintaining their privilege meant making a mockery of the
Confucian institutions they imported from China.

~~~
labster
Sounds like classic meritocracy for me: the awards go to those classes who can
afford the merits.

I'm also interested in knowing more about Heian era Japan -- my knowledge is
limited to reading about the Heian Self Defense Force in Urusei Yatsura and
that's probably dodgy.

~~~
PaulHoule
See

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_Genji)

For what is is worth, women played an early role in Japanese literature,
probably because men thought there wasn't any status to be had writing
fiction. Funny enough, many Japanese comic creators such as Rumiko Takahashi
and Naoko Takeuchi are women too, but nobody in the U.S. compares to male
creators such as Wolfman, Lee, Kirby, etc.

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URSpider94
I had this happen to me in high school. My project won my local fair, at which
point I went on to the state. At that point, someone pointed out that I was
missing a tremendous amount of paperwork, and I had to go seek, ahem, creative
ways to get it done post-facto. My project went on to finish high enough in
the state fair that I got to go to the national event.

The issue here is that ISEF, Intel and other organizations that sponsor
national science fairs don't want a PR disaster when it turns out that the
winning project violates standards for institutional review and consent. That
would be a major scandal and PR black eye. The only way to avoid this is by
having every participant at every level complete the appropriate pre-clearance
for the experiments.

As with any experiment, doing any kind of work with animals (even house pets)
is subject to strict scrutiny, and any work done on humans, even siblings,
even yourself, is subject to the highest level of review. As others have said,
this is a fact of life in science, and learning about informed consent sooner
rather than later is actually a valuable lesson.

~~~
eli
And to be fair, institutional reviews and consent exist for good reason. Not
so long ago it was acceptable to conduct psychological or even medical tests
on uninformed participants, sometimes with terrible results.

There are legitimate arguments beyond just "for PR"

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thaumasiotes
It is still acceptable to conduct psychological experiments on uninformed
participants; everyone in the world does it every day. It is only
"unacceptable" if you call yourself a psychologist while you're doing it, and
subsequently try to publish a paper about it in one of the standard journals
of the field.

Just by way of example, I saw a very funny TV show in which the setup was
this: someone dressed up in a beekeeping suit walked through a public park
with a stack of white boxes, stumbled, dropped them, and started sprinting in
the other direction. The show did this several times and aired the footage.

It turns out that people in a public park are likely to run after the
seemingly-panicked guy in bee armor when he runs away from a pile of boxes he
just dropped. If you wrote a paper about this after doing it rather than
showing your footage on TV, it would be totally unexceptional as a psych
experiment. But writing the paper doesn't make the experiment any more or less
dangerous to the unwitting subjects. It's just the trigger for institutional
review.

The review system exists because professional researchers today generally are
not self-funding. This isn't a problem for science fair entrants.

~~~
zyxley
The beekeeper reminds me of a Schlock Mercenary quote: "A Sergeant in motion
outranks a Lieutenant who doesn't know what's going on. An ordnance technician
at a dead run outranks _everybody_."

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dzdt
Why in the world does an experiment to try to culture mouth bacteria from a
toothbrush require extensive paperwork and professional oversight?

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dbcurtis
Science fair paperwork pretty much parallels university level lab research
paperwork. Anything biological requires an assessment of the level of lab
required, it requires that the lab be correctly supervised, etc, etc. The old
days where a kid could do about anything are long gone. Certainly some
attention to safety is appropriate. But the article is correct in that no kid
could deal with the mountain of paperwork required all by themselves. And the
penalty for missing a piece of the paperwork is severe -- no entry for you.

In fact, it has given rise to a cottage industry of science fair mentors-for-
hire. If you can find a highly enough motivated high school teacher to manage
the paperwork, and can find a lab that has the correct rating for whatever you
are doing, then great for you. Otherwise, there are a few places that can
provide lab space and a mentor at an hourly fee, not to mention experience in
getting the mountain of paperwork correct. It is good to have money to rub on
the problem -- I'm sure a lot of kids get left behind because of that.

My daughter did an electronics project -- and the paperwork was still
daunting, even though we could check "N/A" to all the biohazzard management
sections, lab-has-eyewash, mentor qualified to handle animal tissues, etc. We
still had to submit schematics and test plan material -- which is OK I guess
because it is probably worthwhile to see if the project involves a direct
connection to 220V AC mains before things get out of hand.

In the end though, one of the biggest problems with science fairs is getting
enough qualified judges. The kids pour countless hours into the project, and
hope for a 5-10 minute visit from 4 judges. If you are lucky, the judge might
actually have a clue about your area of science or technology. Then the
judging team tries to figure out some winners. One of the best ways anyone
here on HN could help is to volunteer an afternoon per year to be a judge.
Fairs are _always_ short of qualified judges. Heck, they are short of judges
that can fog a mirror. The best thing you can do for these kids is give them
your time to encourage them and hopefully nudge the system towards a rational
result.

~~~
Houshalter
That's absurd. Surely these are some kind of national science fairs or
something, not ones held by local middle schools?

My school's science fair just required the teacher to sign off on it that it
wasn't dangerous. My experiment involved running electricity through water (to
turn rust back into metal), and no one cared.

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logfromblammo
Nope. For my kid's elementary school science fair, the classmates that were
doing nothing more than collecting survey answers from volunteers had to file
a separate human experimentation waiver form for each of their respondents.

After the informational meeting, I told my kid, point blank, "No people. No
animals. Plants. How about a nice experiment involving plants?"

~~~
barsonme
Ridiculous. One experiment I did in elementary school had something to do with
rocks. Another was seeing how drinks (juice, pop, etc.) ruin teeth (I had a
lot of spare baby teeth at that time), and another where I spoon-fed baby food
to people to see how they reacted to the taste while blindfolded, nose
plugged, etc.

All that without paperwork, and I'm not even very old -- I'm only in my early
20s.

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eanzenberg
I'm sorry but.. safety procedures (and training), paperwork and thorough
tracking of substances are a huge part of actual experimental science. Yes it
may be discouraging that a young child can't just go and do the experiment
they want unhindered but that's not how safety works. Even mundane non-
cleanroom handling isn't allowed until the right safety training is taken
(yearly basis).

P.S. Yes I'm aware a number of these chemicals can be picked up locally at
Home Depot etc. to be "played" with at will, but this doesn't negate how
public-funded experimental research is done.

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gaze
It's completely true! I'm probably pretty good at programming because my
father had connections to a gov't lab and got me an internship. I also really
wanted to get good at math... had my parents or myself known that most math
professors/grad students will talk to anyone about anything within their
subject for as long as they'll listen, they might've driven me to the local
college and brought me to some prof's office. Nobody I knew had any idea of
that though! So yes it's privilege to have all these connections... but even
knowing you can just walk in and ask is a privilege. Privilege is really
subtle.

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CaptSpify
Alternatively, my family was fairly fundamentally religious. I was taught at
an early age to distrust science and math. I eventually fell in love with
programming, but that wasn't until my 20s. It's taken a lot of hard work to
retrain my childhood teachings.

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bluenose69
My experience as a judge: (1) Young kids are more fun than older ones. Grade 6
kids have interesting ideas and explore them. Grade 12 kids work in their
parent's labs. (2) We were told to pick the top female for a special award. I
was thinking about this when another judge (a female) pointed out that there
were almost no boys in the competition. Context: Canada, 10 years ago.

~~~
jrapdx3
Are you suggesting that's "affirmative action" taken too far? (Is it the
principle idea to expect roughly equal boys/girls, or more or less
proportionate participation re: characteristics of eligible students?)

I can understand your comment about younger adolescents vs older ones. 12 year
olds can be more genuinely curious and less "looking for an angle" than their
older, near-college-age contemporaries. That's not universal by any means,
among all kids curiosity is a trait we ought to encourage, not squelch.

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nraynaud
Wait, did I skip the sentence with the answer? What's the best cleanup
product?

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Smaointe
Two straightforward steps can be taken.

First, ensure that schools have enthusiastic and supportive teachers that are
willing to stay back after school to work with kids on their science projects.

Second, remove the barrier to entry. That is, get rid of assessment and
acceptance into science fairs being based on verbose entry forms. Have
preliminary rounds where all students get the joy and buzz of representing at
a science fair.

In Ireland the traditional science fair has been the BT Young Scientist
Exhibition. This competition garners the most money and media attention. Every
year thousands of applications are submitted. These applications are quickly
narrowed down to approximately five hundred which are allowed to represent at
the fair. The way I see it, every year this fair is losing more future
scientists and technologists than it is creating. What kid will be interested
in following and pursuing science after they're discouraged by a rejected
application form?

A new science fair in Ireland that we now have is SciFest. This competition is
in a much more encouraging format. All students no matter what project they
have get the opportunity to present their projects to judges in preliminary
rounds before the winners are brought through to the next round. This is a
much more inclusive format.

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sndean
Somewhat related: Something that I've noticed when helping extremely bright
kids in science fairs: If they're motivated, and there's a pair of them who
are friends, then I'm essentially useless and getting in the way. That's
happened multiple times (getting to the semi-finals/finals of Google, Siemens,
etc.) with pairs.

When they're alone then it doesn't workout so well.

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koolba
> There will be kids showing off homemade spacecraft, Ebola test kits, and
> environmentally safe batteries.

Homemade spacecraft - okay we've all had fantasies of doing this and depending
on how far you've gone with it the primary material starts off with sofa
cushions or cardboard. The sky is limit ( _no pun intended_ ) for ideas on it.
Environmentally safe batteries- okay there's a lot of room for this one too (
_potatoes come to mind_ ).

Not sure about the last one though. How does a child develop an Ebola test
kit?!

 _" Dad can you get me some Ebola ... it's for a science fair project!"_

~~~
bduerst
Elisa tests aren't that difficult to make, assuming you've got access to a lab
somewhere. Since it tests the body's immune response, you just need someone
who recovered from ebola.

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outworlder
That easy, huh?

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bduerst
Much easier to have dad to order live ebola virus.

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chris_wot
I love solar powered hot dog cookers!

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montecarl
If you think about it, earth is a solar powered hot dog cooker. In fact almost
everything is solar powered! Even nuclear fission, which uses unstable
isotopes produced during supernovae.

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Spooky23
This story template gets old. Yes, life is tough as a kid with a poor single
parent.

Blah, blah. A guy with no arms will have a tough time eating with chopsticks.
Equally irrelevant.

Clearly performing a "risk assessment" for an experiment involving washing a
toothbrush with lemon juice and vinegar is an incredibly ridiculous display of
bureaucratic insanity. I wonder if you need to sign a liability waiver for
eating French fries with ketchup? (it contains vinegar, and stains!)

The "privilege" narrative is overplayed to begin with, and in this context it
is absurd next to the elephant in the room.

~~~
jonathankoren
While I don't agree that "the 'privilege' narrative is overplayed," you're
right to point out that this article started with the barrier of a form that
then magically evaporated midway through the article. Presumably they signed
it, otherwise the child wouldn't have been able to compete in the fair. So the
argument of privilege kind of falls apart with respect to the form.

But the argument that the kids with the most connections to real labs and real
scientists win, is pretty solid. That totally jives with my experience judging
regional science fairs. The top kid in each division was inevitably a
professor's kid that did the experiments in the university lab. (e.g. "I then
used the gas chromatograph...")

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paulhart
Read the comment posted by Lauren - it's the best thing on that page.

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aaron695
No, every one else is not a wanker who would send their daughter to a Yale lab
to have to learn science and think that should be normal else the world falls
apart.

