My comments about "Imagine the Future of School Science Fairs" | Wired.com

What will future science fairs look like, assuming they exist at all? If inquiry-based science instruction becomes the norm in the day-to-day science classroom, then I think the nature and quality of projects will change--particularly for middle school students. Instead of the annual dread of working on a required project with little foundation in asking research-able questions and designing experiments, students would have exposure to the design of science experiments to gain understanding about a variety of topics. When I attended the National Science Research Center (NSRC)-a major player in recommending inquiry science education, one of the middle school teachers mentioned to me that she doesn't have to work at all to help the students come up with possible topics for experiments. Whenever they do an experiment in class, if the students don't have time to do further investigation that they are interested in, they write down those ideas in their science notebooks. Some kids will even go home and try out their ideas, even though it's not a homework assignment. They just want to learn more! By science fair time, the students usually have a list of ideas that they could use for a science fair project and are excited to test their questions for further investigation.

As a former science fair participant (International Science and Engineering Fair in 1988 and 1990) and Westinghouse Science Talent Search semifinalist, you would think I would always be a proponent for science fair projects as a way of teaching students about the scientific research process (note I didn't say "scientific method", which is mostly used in the education field but not in "real science" labs). However, textbook-based science curricula do not prepare students to think scientifically. To then throw them in to a required science project is unfair to the students. It's obvious that the students aren't ready for the assignment based upon the amount of help they need from teachers, their parents, and even their neighbors. I created a list of all of the skills I developed while doing science projects, and I'll try to post it here sometime. No other assignment in school, even in high school, requires as much organization, thinking scientifically, writing and presenting well, collect data and use the right mathematical tools to compare the data, than a science fair project does.

I like that Wired.com is challenging its readers to think outside the current model of science fairs in schools and imagine a better process for the future. I'm torn about the desire for collaborative projects. In any group project (even at the university level), there's always going to be one or two students who do all of the work and at least one who doesn't have a clue but still gets credit because of the work of their partners. Yes, in real science, work is done in a more collaborative fashion, but not in the way educators imagine. You might have a team that's working on the same big problem, but each individual has a piece of the problem to work on. Then the group meets regularly to discuss the pieces of the research to determine how to proceed next. (Forgive me for the oversimplification.) Most of the hands-on work in many of the scientific fields is still done individually. For example, if a computer code needs to be written, one person will do most of the work, and will seek out advice from peers and mentors as needed. But, science groups don't have one person who records the experimental work, one person who gets the supplies, and two people who manipulate the supplies to execute the experiment. There's nothing wrong with that model in the classroom, but it isn't "how real scientists do science". The collaborative nature of science is usually much more subtle. In many areas of research, there are only a few people in the world working on a given problem. On the one hand, you would like to "talk shop" with those other people to see if you can help each other with your experiments. On the other hand, you're competing with those same people for grants, intellectual property rights, and first to publish. So, you can't share too much with other scientists because it may impact your own group's ability to continue their research. This is especially true in the corporate world, where first to patent and first to manufacture a product can make the difference between making a profit from the work or not even releasing the product if you have no competitive advantage. http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/05/ff_foundcontest_sciencefairs/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialmedia&utm_campaign=twitterclickthru&goback=%2Egde_2332780_member_116354725


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Following the corpse at the Missouri Botanical Garden

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The 'Corpse' flower....about to bloom at the Missouri Botanical Garden

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This is such an unusual plant. It only blooms once every few years...and only one giant flower. When the flower opens, it emits a terrible smell. Thus the common name of corpse flower.

A fun one to share with students...if you dare!

BBC Nature - Dinosaur gases 'warmed the Earth':

I would have loved to have been in the room when the researchers came up with the idea of calculating how much gas a dinosaur would produce in a given day. Gas produced by the body isn't exactly something we humans like to think about, let alone talk about or study. When the first research was presented about how much methane was being produced by cows all over the world, it was the subject of many jokes. This study leads to a curious hypothesis that a known warming period in climatology history may have been due to dinosaur gas production. I can imagine a joke coming from this research too...maybe something like "how many Ford trucks does it take to produce as much gas as one dinosaur?"

This is a great example of really thinking outside the box in science.

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