Tips for Winning with a Science Fair Project

I've judged several science fairs and I've learned a lot about what other judges and I are looking for in a winning project:

1. Choose Something You Care About. The best projects I've seen were by students who were passionate about something: skateboarding, computer programming, music, ballet, motorcycles, tractors. (Yes, tractors.) There's no reason you can't learn more about, say 2-cycle engines than most of the judges know. They'll recognize that it's something you took interest in for one reason or another -- say because you had a lawn-mowing service or a hobby building motor-powered bicycles or skateboards -- and that took you the effort to become an expert. As a backup, choose something a sibling or parent is passionate about: not because they're going to do the project for you (believe me, we can tell), but because their passion will help you get immersed and focused on a winning idea, and they'll be a valuable resource. Those of us who've done research know the value of a resident expert/consultant.

2. Avoid pseudo-science. Science is science. Science Fair science requires, probably more the regular science, a testable hypothesis and an experiment that puts it brutally to the test. Avoid topics involving astrology, the emotional state of your pet, and such fringe science as mind control, aliens, and conspiracy theories. If you choose a topic like weather forecasting, global warming, or plant and flower growth rates, make sure you take plenty of data to back it up: hundreds of data points, if not thousands. Take your own date to show us you know how to collect it; augment that with raw data (not just published results) from other sources, such as government websites.

3. Document Your Progress. Find, buy, or borrow a digital camera. Photograph your experimental setup. If you traveled to several locations, document it with a map and pictures. (Check contest rules to see who can appear in you pics and whether their faces must be obscured.) Whether your experimental setup (your "bench") is simple or elaborate, show it off in its best light. Marketing is part of science.

4. Do Some Science. I never understand how a high school student was supposed to discover something that the worlds best minds had never noticed before. The truth is that science is more like a sandbox full of pennies than a search for King Tut's tomb. You won't disprove E=MC², but you can definitely test and document a previously undocumented relationship between an independent and a dependent variable. Doing a project on vegetable-based fuels? Synthesize not one but two fuels and determine what mixture gives the best performance. Design your own golf club and determine the weight, length, etc. that gives you the greatest range.

5 Tell us what you did. We're as embarrassed as you are when we see the kid next to you try to explain how three broken cell phones and some articles copied from Wikipedia make a science fair project. Show us, in your backboard and your interview, that you're a scientist, an entrepreneur, a venture capitalist stuck in a teenager's body. Make us forget that we're at a high school event; let us focus on the experience of talking science with a young, confident, and mildly brilliant mind. You'll make the top of our lists.