This was my 14th year, and again on Thursday, I judged senior and junior high school competitors in Behavioral and Social Sciences and then on Saturday, I reviewed the upper and lower elementary entries. In other years I have served for middle school physics or engineering. (My degrees are in criminology and social science and I have some experience as a technical writer in the other areas.) Behavioral always has about 30 to 40 entrants served by three to five teams of six or seven judges. This year, the young scientists were better prepared and they presented themselves better than in the wake of Covid-19 which shut down the schools. Say what you like about the problems with socialized education, generally speaking, teachers are better educators than are parents and school is a better learning environment. That said, they still have not come up to the pre-Covid metrics for performance.
In particular, none of them in this category presented project diaries (typically in bound composition books) or methods and results (in 3-ring binders). One did actually have about 1000 data items on their tablet computer but I had to repeat the question: “You say that you reviewed a hundred entries each from ten different people but where are they?”
AI was big this year. Based on our instructions, for most categories, the challenge was to sort out the results provided by an AI from the work of the student. In Behavioral, two of the competitors had no human subjects but instead trained AIs to respond like people (or so they claimed). As far as I could tell, the young researchers all think that AI is new and none of them had heard of ELIZA.
Overall, in the senior division I was unwilling to advance any entrant to second-round judging, so two more judges were sent down to the hall to find some, which they did. My perception is that the middle schoolers did better than the high schoolers and the elementary entrants were the most promising of all. Parents tend to be more involved with the little kids, for better or worse. I did award a second place and tell the child to give the award to their mother but the youngster did know their stuff and did do the work, so, that counts. I also gave out to kiddos a couple of post-it notes with suggestions for future research. I am looking forward to seeing them (and their notebooks) next year.
PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS
Science Fair: A National Geographic Film
An Abundance of Talent: the 2015 Austin Energy Regional Science Festival
2017 Austin Energy Regional Science Fair
Science Fairs and Science Frauds
