From Elementary To High School - Get That Winning Edge
Coming up with winning elementary school science fair projects with that winning edge is not an easy thing. When I was a kid in middle school, I was absolutely obsessed with winning the science fair. Nevertheless, I was unable to come up with a winning science fair project until my final year. I tried everything. I experimented on plants and animals, I studied the environment, I came up with interesting designs for devices I could build – nothing worked. The science fair projects winning would be so much more professionally laid out. They were better designed, more beautiful to look at, and more slickly produced.
That is when I realized something about winning science fair projects that I had missed previously. The winning science fair project was not the one that had the best science in it necessarily, but the one that was easiest to look at. The whole point was to come up with something that would entertain and amuse the judges, something that would make an immediate impression without much effort. That isn't to say that winning science fair projects don't need to have good solid science behind them. It is important to have a good subject for your study. But even more important than that is coming out with a layout and design scheme that will really make an impression and blow the competition away.
I would like to say that I came up with a winning science fair project all on my own, but in truth I had some help. In the particular science fair competition I was entering, we were allowed to work in teams with other students. A group of three of us put together a computer science project that would just knock your socks off. Back then, sophisticated computer graphics were a rarity. We happened to go to a school which had an excellent computer lab, and we put that to our advantage. That year, all of the elementary school science fair projects that were praised were in computer science. It was simply the cutting edge.
Nowadays, finding winning science fair projects is even harder than back then. There isn't really a cutting edge in technology – at least one that kids can exploit. You can't very well do a nanotechnology science fair project, for example, or something in DNA. Nevertheless, the same principles apply for winning science fair projects. Dazzle counts as much of substance, so be sure to cover all your bases and you should have a good chance of winning.
