🏫 Running a school science fair

Six dates, counted back from fair day

Pick the fair date first and count back; 6 weeks is comfortable:

• 6 weeks before: The letter goes home with the fair date and the rules.
• 5 weeks before: Each child's question is due, for the teacher to check.
• 4 weeks before: Testing starts: hypothesis written, sheets printed, logbook open.
• 2 weeks before: Results table and graph due for a check.
• 3 days before: The board is due.
• Fair day: Fair day and judging.

The organizer turns your fair date into these six dated lines and prints them on the letter home. The early question check matters most: it catches the questions that are really demonstrations while there's still time to fix them.

Rooms and tables

Allow about four feet of table for each project: a standard tri-fold board is 48 inches wide when it's open. A common limit is 30 inches deep, 48 inches wide and 96 inches high, from the table. A standard 36 × 48 inch tri-fold fits.

Display rules are worth putting on the letter, so nobody arrives with something they can't set down. One K–5 rule set bans liquids and batteries on the display and anything hotter than 75 °C; another bans open containers. Bring photos and drawings of the test instead.

Since nothing on display needs power, any room with tables works. Leave aisles wide enough for two judges to stand at a board while families pass behind them, and put the youngest grades nearest the door.

Judges

The Alpine School District's judging procedures send two judges to each project for four to five minutes. That makes a useful planning number: at five minutes a project and a minute to score, one pair of judges sees about ten projects an hour. Sixty projects in a two-hour window needs three pairs.

Judges can be teachers, older students, parents of children in other grades, and people from the community who work with science. Give each one the judge's card with these nine questions, adapted from the Alpine list and Scientific American's five most common judge questions:

• What made you want to ask this question?
• What did you think would happen, and why?
• What did you change, and what did you measure?
• What did you keep the same, and why does that matter?
• How many times did you test it?
• What did you find out? Show me in your numbers.
• Was your hypothesis right? How do you know?
• Did anything go wrong, or surprise you?
• If you did it again, what would you change or test next?

Children can practise the same nine at the judge's practice, so nothing on the day comes as a surprise.

One rubric, out of 24

Score 6 things, 1 to 4 each, for 24 points in all. Here's what a 4 and a 1 look like:

• Question: a 4 is "testable: one thing changed, one thing measured"; a 1 is "a topic or a demonstration, nothing tested".
• Method: a 4 is "controls named and kept; three or more tries a level"; a 1 is "changed several things at once, or one try".
• Data: a 4 is "a clear table with units, means where expected, a graph"; a 1 is "no numbers, or numbers with no table".
• Conclusion: a 4 is "uses the numbers; honest when the hypothesis was wrong"; a 1 is "restates the hypothesis, no numbers".
• Board: a 4 is "in order, readable from a step back, the child's own words"; a 1 is "hard to follow, or a grown-up's words".
• Interview: a 4 is "explains the test and the results in their own words"; a 1 is "can't say what was changed or measured".

Two things worth telling judges in advance: a wrong hypothesis with honest numbers can still score a 4 for its conclusion, and a board in a child's own handwriting should score as well as a printed one. This rubric is ours, written for the projects here. If your district has its own, use that.

The letter home

The letter goes home six weeks out with the fair date, the six dates and the rules. The organizer's version has blanks for your contact details and no Peabody branding, so it reads as the school's own. In plain words, it says:

• Every child tests one question of their own and shows what they found on a display board.
• Change one thing, measure one thing, and test it at least three times.
• The safety rules, in one line.
• How to help: ask questions, hold the ruler, keep them safe, and leave the words and drawings to the child.

The rules themselves, with their sources, are on the rules page. Point families at Pick my project, which hands a child one project in four taps, or at the easy projects for a first fair.

Your district's rules come first. Where they differ from anything here, follow them. Your school's sheet wins.