They should actually be science - mostly reproducing/validating things in rigorous methodical ways.
There's far too many adults that don't seem to grasp the basic principles of what the discipline of science is.
At the earliest level instead they should be replaced with kids having to come up with experiments to either show something is or is not real based on an existing demonstration.
For instance, I'll make the claim that each different color of Trix has a unique flavor. And that you can test this because when you eat a certain color you always taste the same flavor. Then the kids will have to come up with experiments that show that although that is true, the claim that they are flavored differently is false.
Another example. I'll claim that a tall slender glass holds more liquid then a short and narrow one of equal volume and as evidence I'll show that companies charge more for the tall and slender and people pay more for it willingly.
Essentially you start out with something where the response is "that's true but," and then an experiment is constructed from there.
This approach allows for some important lessons.
1. You don't have to successfully explain the phenomena to demonstrate the claim is false.
2. That science is about skepticism until you're forced to accept something essentially by exhaustion of objections
3. That poorly constructed tests can reproduce a phenomena that you're trying to isolate, etc.
The change is to not make it open ended or have projects or theme fairs. No posterboards or presentations.
Instead it's a form of debate club with interlocutors where groups are trying to fake and fool the others and separate things
When the general public accuses people of putting their "trust in science" I mean, this will kill that. No, science is all about strong methodological distrust - that's one of the basic premises.
> 1. You don't have to successfully explain the phenomena to demonstrate the claim is false.
Sometimes I feel like this is taken to the extreme for non-scientists that say that lack of evidence is in itself evidence. Depending on the circumstance and the tests, that could be true but its often a default mode.
> Sometimes I feel like this is taken to the extreme for non-scientists that say that lack of evidence is in itself evidence.
But of course, the lack of evidence is itself evidence, if you have a sufficiently large data sample and haven't seen the thing you're looking for. Keep pursuing the increasingly unlikely outcome, and you're just engaged in science-flavored religious catechism.
I see the fallacy routinely misapplied by all sides of most hot-button science-meets-politics issues. A great many scientists will regularly substitute their own pet theories for conclusions, and strenuously ignore the lack of supporting evidence, citing the old "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" saw. Then they turn around and mock "non-scientists" for doing the same thing. Neither side is right, of course, but dressing in a lab coat doesn't make it better.
Just to circle it back to the topic of science education, I'd love to see a science curriculum at the middle- and high-school level that equipped people to reason through this kind of thing by focusing on tearing apart pop research. A "science fair" is actually hard to do well just because most science fails, but a "scientific bullshit fair" would have almost infinite fertile ground from nutrition studies alone.
You can believe in a phenomena and still do good science. It all depends on if your exp design is free of bias. Randomizing, blinding, instrumentation, pre-registration, statistical rigor - there all sorts of ways to do this. I say this because I think non-scientists regularly say that science is biased because scientists are biased. The cool thing about science is you don't have to have any pretense of objectivity as a person as long as your experiment is independent.
> I say this because I think non-scientists regularly say that science is biased because scientists are biased.
As any other field, the science is as good as the scientist that produced it. For example, there is a serious reproducibility crisis in multiple fields, like psychology, and social sciences. In the latter it is hard to say of its due to systemic educational failure of the PhD students in those fields, or that the field and personal politics are merging too tightly.
Unfortunately, all it takes is one bad scientist to discredit the rest, e.g., Wakefield.
I know what you are saying, but I'm arguing that science is great because it produces better output than the people that make it as long as they stick to good methods.
As for reproducibility, its my opinion that it has more to do with incentives and constraints than the ethics or intellectual capacity of the researcher (although those are real components too)
> I'm arguing that science is great because it produces better output than the people that make it as long as they stick to good methods.
I don’t think we have a contradiction here. What I am saying is that science is made by people, and we as scientists have to be extremely vigilant today not to let “ends justify the means” crowd to use the name of science for their own agenda.
Did you get to the end of the article?
Still misses the mark.
It should be designed for the 95% of students who are not going to be scientists so that they become better citizens and we aren't just flooded by piles of misguided people when it comes to funding public policy. Instead we want people to have the basic literacy to know that say, MMS (Miracle Mineral Solution) is wildly unsound.
It should be seen as a society-wide improvement project like the declination of smoking or how people are exercising more and eating healthier then half a century ago.
This is the same kind of project.
People should know "What is science? What do people who do it do? If someone claims to do science, how can I know if their claims are legitimate? What are the red flags? If I'm presented with a scientific looking document, what questions should I ask?"
They should know it's a self-correcting system and not a belief tribe.
Example: My friend sent me this anti-vax report a few years ago showing how children who didn't get vaccinated had a lower reported occurrence of a number of diseases. I mean obviously - the parents who distrust clinicians aren't going to get their child diagnosed. Of course the reported occurrence is lower. Measurement bias.
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. A graph that was so convincing to my friend shouldn't have been. They should have been inculcated from an early age to ask such questions and shouldn't have fallen for such bad science.
There's a bunch of subjects we can probably slack on with the general public without dire consequences. Adults can be ignorant on say american literature, chemistry, or ancient history without much affect. Core scientific literacy, however, is proving to be one of the important ones.
If it's for 95% if students who aren't interested in being scientists, then it shouldn't be an extracurricular science fair, but a part (maybe a big part) of the regular curriculum in science class. Science fairs are for the science enthusiasts, I think.
Yep, this should be mandatory. The "science nerds" can still nerd out on more complex topics, but the "normies" should be required to prove a basic level of scientific literacy.
still misses the mark
Okay, but we still want you to admit that GP was subsumed by the article.
I like the science and engineering fairs though because "I built a thing" doesn't fit into the scientific model. I always had this trouble in the fair with robotics because what's the hypothesis? "I hypothesize I can build a robot that..." no that's not science that's engineering.
To be fair, a lot of science doesn't follow the scientific method. I've yet to see an applied mathematician (to speak only of what I know) come up with a hypothesis, it's usually rather: here's how people solve this problem currently, this has this and that drawback, and our paper introduces a new method that solves bigger problems faster/new classes of problems.
The same could be said of theoretical work: here, we tightened up an inequality.
This is also research, not all of it is experimental!
Yeah I get it when giving projects to kids it's easier to be like "Here are the 5 sections you have to do" and then grade them on how well they did the 5 sections... but that's really limiting the spirit of the thing if the idea was to let the kids off the leash and see where they can take their minds.
We did ISEF in highschool. I always wanted to build something but just couldn't figure out a way to justify it. My teacher usually just said do an experiment please. I usually just did some lame science project that didn't really produce anything interesting.
Freshman year: effect of light wavelength on basil plant growth. I shined a black light, a regular light bulb, and a very bright IR light at some basil plants. I probably could have made it better by doing colored lights with controlled lux levels. Didn't win anything and the judges were unimpressed.
Sophomore year: effect of water pH on electrolysis gas production. Varied the pH on some water and put it in an electrolysis apparatus. I actually got 3rd place in the highschool chemistry group surprisingly. It wasn't a very rigorous project but I guess no one else did anything terribly interesting. Not enough to go onto regional or state level (not sure what came next). Even my parents were surprised.
It's also really damned hard to come up with an interesting, novel question, that is testable, with resources available to the average school child, in a reasonable amount of time.
Allowing engineering opens up the workable space by quite a bit.
Questions don't need to be new to be science.
My brother and I, for example, did an experiment where we tested pH of various water bodies around us. The hypothesis was based off of local drainage patterns.
Not a new question... Still scientific.
That's not science then. Just because engineering is equally enigmatic to most people as science doesn't mean they're the same.
Science means applying the scientific method.
"I hypothesize that method X is the best way to construct a robot that does Y and I've tested methods A, B, and C to validate that claim"
That's science.
Just building something can actually be a pursuit of non science..this is why many engineers have not invented here syndrome. They think they're thinking scientifically, but they don't. Thus, instead of checking their assumptions, they run with them.
The fundamental issue is that all of education and childhood accomplishments have become cynical, overly competitive games. Science fairs are now attempts for a child to piggyback off of a lab’s existing work and claim they discovered it. Sports are a vehicle to college admissions. Disability claims become another way to gain an academic advantage. It’s no surprise that the 30 under 30 are filled with scammers and criminals. It’s what we’re teaching students who want to get ahead.
My kids are in things that seem like competition doesn't really need to be a thing and places undue stress on those involved. I'm left wondering, why does everything seem to turn into a a competition with schools (or humans in general)? Why can't folks just do something without needing to compare themselves to others? I'm guessing science fairs (and similar things) didn't start out as a competition, why "poison the well"?
Many people enjoy competition and find it motivating. This is why sports are so popular, and why many organized activities tend to become competitive. Not everyone enjoys it of course, but the people motivated enough to organize large science fairs are probably highly motivated in general and that tends to corelate with competitiveness.
Not to mention that any large event takes funding. It may not be "for profit" and even if most or all the needed resources are donated there will be people competing for those donations.
I don’t think this is part of humans because so many of us genuinely chafe against the system. I think it’s because of power and hierarchy and signaling. It’s like when you play board games with a friend and then they turn it into a competition and then it’s not fun anymore. At least with a board game you can walk away. But if it’s your child’s future on the line you will be just as competitive even if you don’t want to be.
So long as there are humans who want to amass power in some way and treat it as a zero sum game, there will be other humans forced to play similarly. Prisoners dilemma.
The answer to "why?" is fairly straightforward, in a way, but hard to see the causality of directly without seeing through all the steps to get there. This is a consequence of two economic factors: globalism and wealth inequality. When there is a strict and unbalanced economic hierarchy, parents will rightfully do anything they can to ensure their children move up the hierarchy or stay on top of the hierarchy. When you are on a hierarchy with everyone in the world instead of just those local to you, the contrasts that must exist to reinforce the hierarchy become larger to remain statistically significant over the larger population. When society had less economic inequality and was more geographically restricted in its entrants, the drive for competition was minimized and other priorities could come to the forefront.
We didn't get here overnight, but economic inequality dominates as a causal factor for nearly any socioeconomic phenomena you can identify in 2026. This is what happens when the top 10% of income earners comprise 50% of consumer spending, and you need to be in the top 15% of income earners to afford permanent housing. If you're a 30% parent (better off than 70% of households), the most important thing you can do for your children is to ensure that they end up in the top 15% or better yet the top 10%. Anything you can do that will help that end, is worth doing, and every moment becomes a competition to set things up as the earlier you do it the bigger the impact in the results.
There's a reason why home prices are correlated to with school district access, why every children's activity becomes a competition, and why in the wealthier (but more rat-racy) parts of the country people spend huge money on private tutoring, education, and training for their children almost from birth.
Possibly a most archetypal example of Goodhart's law:
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Parents find kids get ahead by not only good grades but also by winning in science fairs, sports, or disability claims, so they figure out ways to game those systems . . . and, their value as a measure is eliminated.
With few exceptions, these are now only a measure of how well their parents gamed the system.
I think there's more than that. When your parents think the earth is flat it's hard to learn science. George Bush's "No Child Left Behind" we're finally seeing the ramifications across our country. When you can never fail you can never learn.
Where I grew up there was no "Science Fair Circuit" like described in this article. Science fairs where a way for young kids (aged 8-10) to test silly hypothesis. There was no feeding into national fairs or anything like that.
I remember one being how fast bean sprouts grew when watered with different liquids (Water, Olive Oil, Wine, Coke, ect). An idea a kid came up with and tested with only minimal help from parents.
To me they should be about exploring independent ideas. I love the Adam Savage quote: "Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down". To me this is what they should capture.
It always seemed like there were three tiers of students/projects when the science fair came around each year.
1. Just generic stuff. Growing plants with something different in the soil/water, what shape of balsa wood makes the strongest structure, etc
2. You were taken under the wing of the science teacher, were given better ideas which were encouraged, got to use some equipment from the school, that sort of thing.
3. The highest tier, one of your parents was a biologist, engineer or chemist at one of the local big companies, you did some very specialized research, were able to use some very fancy equipment, etc. These kids almost always seemed to have the best chance of winning.
I was into model rockets at the time, so I cant remember what my hypothesis was, but I remember it was whatever would allow me to shoot off the most and biggest rocket engines possible :)
At my school the generic stuff one because parents and teachers are dumb
Many years ago, as a grad student in Electrical Engineering, I got asked to help judge at a high school science fair. It was fairly disillusioning. The best presentations were pretty obviously done with a lot of parental "help", or otherwise were presenting an experiment designed by adults (this was clear from questioning). It was more like competitive science homework, than a bunch of science experiments.
Yeah it was super obvious who got help from parents and who did everything on their own. I did FIRST Robotics in highschool and that was another place where it was obvious which teams got a lot of help from their parents and which teams were entirely run by the students. We got some help from sponsors for stuff like welding aluminum frames but it was entirely our design. I remember the team from Cocoa Beach Highschool looked like a NASA designed rover (which it probably was).
The fundamental issue is that our public school system turned into a training ground to serve corporations. To teach us all to be followers. Raise you hand. Sit still all day. Now there are fewer and fewer corporate jobs so that purpose is outmoded. Why train every American young person to be a drone when there is no need for drones?
Why do we still have schools then? Why do people still fund these outmoded institutions? Because now both parents need to work in order to earn enough live. As a result schools (junior and high) are simply glorified day care or prisons. And yes they serve some purpose and do some good for some, maybe even many people. But for many of our young they simply instill unproductive ideas and behaviors.
If we are interested in our children having good productive lives, our high school are for many kids of zero value or negative value.
We do not need more followers/drones. We need doers.
A science fair can be one of the few opportunities a young person has to do, as opposed to follow. Lets enhance that and provide more.
That’s not a new phenomenon. The public education system is rooted in creating factory workers for the Industrial Revolution.
Goodheart's Law of college admissions
“ modern competitive fairs direct the student to use science as a form of self-promotion.”
Sadly, that is excellent preparation for the job of an academic scientist today. Performing at a high level is inextricably linked with self promotion in this system, all the way to the top.
> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer. I remember in my high school physics class we were first taught the value of Earth’s gravitational constant g, and then asked to perform an experiment that should reveal it.
> Of course, working with cruder tools, limited patience, and air resistance, many of us didn’t wind up squarely on 9.8 m/s^2. One of my partners was quick to scribble out our actual observation, and she and I had a brief struggle over control of the pencil as she attempted to put in the “correct” answer. She had a better sense of the teacher’s intentions than I did. The tables that honestly reported a “wrong” result were encouraged to repeat their experiment until they got a trial that “worked.” We missed the chance to talk about how scientists reconcile noisy data. We missed the chance to run an experiment for the purpose of exploring the unknown.
> Students in science fairs and adults in professional labs know the answer they’re supposed to get.
Huh. I always hated being compelled to participate in school science fairs and school science labs, but it wouldn't have occurred to me that this was a problem. It's obvious that you're going to have measurement errors. That's an expected part of every lab. As it was presented in every single science class, the point is to respond to your own measurement errors by including a discussion of why your numbers might be different than expected. ("My ruler was not graded below a resolution of one centimeter.")
I cannot stand the science lab approach of "Here's a description of an experiment that you cannot reproduce. Try anyway, and then write up a lab report pretending that you accomplished something."
But I would kind of like a lab along the lines of "Here are some primitive tools. See how close you can get to measuring [quantity X]."
And yet this other HN article right below shows otherwise https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/this-14-year-old-i...
It's a good call excluding the Standford Prison Experiment lol....
I don't think there was ever a "thought" behind science fairs to be "rethought" now. They're from the "this is something, therefore, we must do it" school of science education.
Most education as delivered is uninterested in whether the recipients learn anything. I remember reading an essay by someone who gave a presentation at an education conference...
He wrote that a schoolteacher came up to him afterwards, excited about his talk. She wanted his opinion on her favorite part of the school year: each of her students gave an oral presentation on a theme that she assigned. She was proud of this assignment, because (a) she enjoyed watching the presentations, and (b) the students liked doing them.
And I was appalled to read this, because I consider those presentations a fancy form of abuse, and they're obviously worthless. But the essay author said:
"I am not going to tell you what I think. Instead, I want to ask you two questions:
First, can you imagine someone knowing the material of your class well, but doing poorly on the presentation?
Second, can you imagine someone doing well on the presentation, but not knowing the material?"
And the teacher grew very quiet.
> they're obviously worthless
Collecting information, organising it into a easy to understand format and then presenting that information to others is a very common task in real life. There are whole very well paid and respected professions where their job is mainly about doing that. (lawyers, teachers, tv presenters, etc.) It is also a crucial element in many other jobs where it is not thought as the main part of the job itself. Doesn't matter how good of an engineer you are if you can't convince others to give you the resources for your excellent plans. Doesn't matter how good of a scientist you are if you can't tell others your results. Doesn't matter how visionary a business leader you are if you can't convince others to give you money for your businesses.
I'm not saying it is the only useful skill. There are many others. But it is certainly part of the toolkit of a well rounded and skilled human. I'm curious how you concluded that it is "obviously worthless" practicing it.
I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. Public speaking is itself a skill that the teacher presumably wanted to teach their students. These types of assignments are also quicker to grade (and on class time, no less) and harder to cheat at than written exams: - students copying on their neighbor - students using their smartphone in class or in the restroom - old-school cheats (cheat sheets hidden on their person)
Even disregarding cheating, why should ability at written exams be the only measure of a student? Some crumble under the pressure of the moment and perform poorly as their mind blanks. They don't trust their abilities and find themselves terrified in front of an exam sheet. Having time to research a subject and carefully rehearse it can be reassuring. Others (as was my case) have the opposite problem; they trust themselves fully to improvise their way to a good grade in front of a sheet of paper but freeze up if they have to speak in front of a crowd. But these students already get their way in the 99% of evaluations that are not in this format.
> Even disregarding cheating, why should ability at written exams be the only measure of a student?
The measure of a student should be something that measures them as a student. That was ruled out by the second question.
> And the teacher grew very quiet.
I'm sorry, but this is a yarn. The story is either about a very inexperienced teacher (of which there are many), so not representative of the profession as a whole; or it's invented by the author to make a rhetorical point, but not a real thing that happened.
What you say the speaker pointed out to the teacher is basic teaching praxis. The idea that this teacher was somehow stunned to silence by the hypotheticals says more about her personal abilities as a teacher than the teaching profession (you framed this as how "most" education is delivered).
The number one thing we do when designing classes is first we talk about outcomes: what do we want the student to know after the class? Then we talk about prereqs: what should they know coming in? From there, we design assessments to actually measure whether the outcomes were achieved. During the class we implement the assessments, and then after the class we analyze the results to determine if we were successful in attaining outcomes. Then we reassess the course and iterate. But at all stages, student outcomes are driving the design, so I must disagree with the idea most education is uninterested in whether the students learn anything.
Yeah. It has a very strong "and then everyone clapped" vibe to it.
But even if the teacher "grew very quiet" in actual fact there can be many reason behind that. The story as told tries to imply that they realised that they were wrong somehow for doing these presentations. It is also possible that they went quiet because they realised that there is no point in asking whatever they wanted to ask under such a hostile interrogation.
It is also lovely to note that the supposed interaction happened with "someone who gave a presentation at an education conference". I guess that someone must have been born with the skills to present, because they (according to the story) think very lowly about the idea of practicing it.
> In 2007 (my senior year), I went to two major national science fairs.
I did the science fair circuit growing up from 7th through 12th grade, then coached HS students on projects when I was in college. Today I'm a judge for ISEF, which is happening shortly.
Frankly, the whole scene is a bit done by 12th grade, so I'm not really sure this person has enough experience doing fairs to say what's broken about them and how to fix them. It's really a middle school to early high school thing; if you're starting in senior year most of the best students are already set with results they will use to apply to colleges, so they stop doing fairs in senior year. 8,9,10 is the real heat.
It's also not the common case that a student is placed in a research lab and works on in-progress research, you see all kinds of students doing varied projects. I judge the CS field and yeah you get projects which are essentially "Me and my dad built a PC" (although I've never seen a volcano project). Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel. Some of them have a giant board with binders upon binders upon binders and it's clear the kid was coached and worked at his mom's lab. The "consumer science" category of the fair grows every year.
But really no matter what, I find this to be true of all students at the fair:
> Science exploration driven by genuine curiosity is more open-ended than experiments that come in a box and test students on whether they get the right answer.
All the kids exhibit genuine curiosity and open-mindedness. Some of them are only capable of doing experiments that come in a box, but they're still curious. So I don't really know what the author is trying to say with this article. Is there actually a problem, and if so how bad is it? I'm all for changing up the science fair and evolving it and doing a new format, but I don't think they're especially lacking in innovative spirit as the author implies.
I am happy to hear that things as not as bad as I thought, but my experience being judge/mentor for a couple of years for the high school science fair near a top university was very discouraging and closer to what the author of the article describes.
Maybe the mass of the kids at the first round were what you describe, but very quickly the focus turned to the top 20% who were very much "reputation laundering" and "CV padding" internships at labs, not actual curiosity driven independent exploration
> Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel.
It might be novel to the student. What I mean is that IMO, science fairs should be more about the students exploring and learning/using the scientific method, even if a similar experiment has been done thousands of times before.
An issue with that, especially now that they might go to LLMs for bibliography / exploratory work rather than google or a library, is that they may be exposed to the solution before even really tackling the problem.
Maybe that's fine, but it seems to me like it spoils the fun.
Pretty sure the article agrees with you. They made soap and ink more as makers rather than fake a deeper expertise
Just drop them. They don't make much sense from the outside looking in.
I always assumed that children, particularly below highschool, were cheating of they had done anything too novel like biological research, and that it was obviously the work/guidance of their parents.
Obviously, geniuses exist, but I was still skeptical.
The old science fairs actually did find real geniuses. Many kids who placed highly in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search ended up winning Nobel Prizes later in life.
The modern ones are sadly just another checkbox for college admissions, full of cheaters gaming the metrics.
Unfortunately these are a form of "achievement laundering". When I hear about some young person who won a national science fair I assume their parents are upper-middle class or higher and had connections with a research lab. See
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01425-4
If the problem in that paper is not addressed, any kind of DEI in academia is hollow, e.g. "if you are black and your parents are professors you get 500 job offers."
It is very hard to make any progress in this area because there is a lot of demand for status to be hereditary and the more strident anyone is about "meritocracy" the more concerned they are that people in powerful roles are perceived to be deserving of them and the less concerned that talented people find opportunity.
Having parents who work at a research lab does usually mean your family spends More time learning and talking about science. So the merit is often real. It’s just that the access to the opportunity was not.
The really interesting thing I noticed in grad school was that the professor's kids were just the opposite. That is, I went to grad school because I had a hunger for knowledge, they went to grad school because they had a lack of imagination and couldn't imagine doing anything that wasn't the family business.
There's definitely a degree of that. When I was in the fairs, the winning kids were often the ones with the giant posters 3 stories tall working in a lab no on else had access to. I had to beg my school for a $100 robot controller to do my project, and my truck driver dad and SAHM didn't have access to a fancy lab where I could do experiments.
Still, although it's hard to compete with the upper echelons, you can still get results that land you in schools you wouldn't have gotten into otherwise. 100% the reason I got into CMU was my science fair work. I personally never got 1st place at science fair, but I won awards (there's tons of special category awards) and was competitive, and others who didn't have access to a big research lab did get first place. So, yes, it's not exactly fair but at the same time it doesn't mean you're out of the competition if you don't have access to those privileges.