Science Fair

Every year we participate in The Science Fair, and I've never known any one event to inspire such angst among parents. Do you help? A little? A lot? Only with the tedious (expensive, dangerous) parts? Do you get a book of 100 prizewinning science fair projects? Is that only for idiots? Does it make you a bad parent if you just chuck them in a room with a display board and tell them to figure it out themselves or is that a sign that you're giving them an appropriate amount of independence and showing off just how much you didn't do it for them? And once you've figured out what role you play, how do you deal with the other parents and their other choices?

And just how much do the kids care anyway? If you say "science fair" to a kid, I bet you'll hear about the demonstration that one of the organizers did three years ago with the liquid nitrogen and the carnations and the hammer... and then about how our homeschool group can't do anything without a potluck and at last year's science fair the snacks were excellent. Project? what project? Oh right... I did a project. About... something.... But there was a kid who built a hovercraft and I got to ride it and that was really cool...

Say "science fair" in front of a parent and you get volumes of stories of the other parents ... the Parents Who Helped. The monsters! I've never actually met one of these parents -- it's always Someone Else -- but apparently they exist. Huge numbers of them. From what I can tell, if a political candidate were to run on the "help your kid with his science fair project" platform he'd be a shoe-in. I mean we wouldn't vote for him ourselves of course because we're busy Not Helping. Well not helping Too Much anyway. I mean except for the parts that it's okay to help with (what we did) - and not all the other parts (what everyone else did).

A good science fair project, done well, teaches a LOT of different things. Things you can't learn if they're done for you.

1. It gives a kid the chance to investigate a question that he's interested in (even one that his textbook and/or teacher couldn't care less about!) -- yay curiosity!


2. It requires some practice in the finding and reading of previous research, so he knows what the possibilities are. Library skills! Or if you're more daring, and your research topic doesn't include any of the various key words that might turn up something, er... *unseemly*.... Google skills!


3. It's a chance for some good hard critical thinking, about what the research tells him about his own question and how to form a hypothesis, and then even better, how to design a reliable procedure to test the hypothesis!


4. There can be plenty of math in deciding what the data says about the hypothesis -- anything from counting to some pretty snazzy statistics.


5. And when it's all done, it has to be communicated to others so they understand what was tried and what was found. Clear writing, good use of visual aids, graphs, charts, photos, and a coherent answer for any question someone might ask.

The things I think you can do for a younger kid are helping with the reading and helping with the writing. There are plenty of opportunities for kids to work on their reading skills and their handwriting -- it doesn't have to be thrown in with science. And there are often parts of experiments that really do require assistance. In fact if you're participating in an ISEF-affiliated fair, you were supposed to have already signed a pledge to supervise and assist where required for safety. Don't give me that "independence" line when there's a six year old with an open flame.

For a kid who has no experience with research, you will probably have to teach them (without doing it for them) how to find books and articles, how a hypothesis is developed, how an experiment is designed, and how data can be collected and organized. I would not interfere at all with choosing a project, choosing a hypothesis, or making the conclusion. And I really prefer, when I'm helping with carrying out the experiment (see "six year old with open flame" above, or less-dramatic, "eight year old can't reach ceiling, even on stepladder"), for him to have given me explicit written instructions to make it abundantly clear that I'm the lovely assistant and not the decision maker.

The first couple years we did projects, there was a fair bit that the darling child still needed to learn and I needed to teach. Each year there's less -- he can make a darn good hypothesis these days without my having to ask him if it's testable. At this point my major interference is in the schedule. This was the first year that he came up with his own timeline of what needed to be done and when, but I'm still the enforcer. It usually goes "You know it's two weeks to the science fair and you still have a blank board and you're three days behind your own schedule. If you don't get cracking you are not going to be done in time!" Yes, time management is one of the lessons one might learn from a science fair project, but on the other hand nagging isn't really the same as assistance...

The hardest part to stay out of, in my opinion, is the writing. There is nothing as difficult as watching a child painfully typing out an 800-word run-on-sentence, unless it's typing it yourself from dictation. Just bite your tongue and do it. Really. Once it's done it's easier to mark up the grammar and spelling and leave the content intact... If you interfere while he's still composing you lose the meat of it all -- what the child actually understands about his own work. What I do suggest to the darling child when communication is an issue, is that he explain it to other people and for Pete's sake pay attention to what they don't understand. Could his best friend replicate his experiment from those instructions? Really?? How about we call him up and give that a try, eh? If you email Grandma and tell her what your conclusion is, is she going to understand it? Can you answer all her questions? Are the graphs clear enough that the cat could figure them out?

All of these lessons are terribly valuable outside of the science fair arena. I mean really -- if you're learning something only for the purpose of winning a student competition, then whatever are you going to do with that skill when you're a real grownup with a real job? I mean, unless you're on the professional science-fair-judging circuit? But being able to formulate, research and test a hypothesis is applicable to so many real situations -- does your car make that funny noise only when you're driving east? or is it when you're going uphill? or only going uphill AND east on a windy day?

Being able to read original research and interpret data will get you through the evening news without undue panic. Does broccoli really prevent cancer? Or does it cause cancer? or maybe it prevents one kind and causes another? But only if you're a nun? And learning to communicate all of that information and detail in reasonably readable prose puts you head and shoulders above most of the rest of us who can't even pen a blog without run-on sentences but who refuse to change because we've heard that people whose writing is overly complicated don't get Alzheimers. It was on the evening news, so it has to be true.