At Skinner Middle School in Denver, CO, hundreds of students present their science research to dozens of judges who award passing grades and prize ribbons to top projects, according to an article in the Denver NorthStar.
Christopher Martin, the school’s science department head, says the science fair is a huge effort that builds students’ science literacy and soft skills like time management and public speaking.
Students typically don’t have a lot of science instruction in elementary school, if at all, Martin says. It’s a big shift to have a designated class every day and embark on projects.
Materials students need for their projects are purchased by the school, and the school allocates class time when experiments can be conducted, data collected and charted, and conclusions written up. This takes pressure off families and teaches students to work independently, Martin says.
Projects range from “How high does a Hot Wheels track have to be for a marble to make a loop?” to investigating how age affects the pattern-separation abilities of the dentate gyrus (a region of the brain in the hippocampus).
Seventh-graders Bennett Niehues and Emmett Salzburg are cross-country runners, so they conducted an experiment investigating how body temperature affects running performance. They asked participants to run a 1.5-mile route at normal body temperature, after dunking in an ice bath and after sweating in a sauna. They found that average body temperature led to peak performance, and most participants reported cramping muscles and soreness after the sauna and shortness of breath and sluggishness after the ice bath. The boys said their project took a lot of time to coordinate, gather the materials, determine a route and schedule the experiment on days when the outside temperature was cold or hot enough to align with the experiment.
Seventh-graders Dekker Bouett and Easton Gabriel tested how visual differences in the same food affected people’s reported taste. They used frosting as their variable, all vanilla flavored but one was white and the other dyed pink. Their results showed 88% of people correctly guessed the white flavor as vanilla, but only 38% correctly guessed the pink flavor as vanilla. Their biggest challenge was having too many people interested in being test subjects, Bouett said.
High school teachers who work with former Skinner students note a marked difference in their science skills compared to other students. Skinner recruits former students to come back and judge sixth- and seventh-grade projects. This also allows students to connect over memories, their projects and favorite teachers at Skinner.
Eighth-graders are evaluated by outside judges, such as Ami Haas, a neuroscience graduate student at the University of Colorado Anschutz. Haas was mentored in middle school through the educational nonprofit Community Resources, which helps facilitate science fairs in Denver Public Schools. This led her to a career in science, she said.
The judging component adds to the caliber and expectations of the student projects. Students take the science fair seriously, knowing they will publicly present their projects.
Judges evaluate projects based on a rubric from the school district that measures each portion of a project—from prior research to data collection to synthesis—on a point scale. Judges then evaluate the top 10 to 20 projects for uniqueness and quality, choosing three to five from each grade as winners.
Some winners then compete in district, regional, state and even national science fair competitions, which can award cash prizes and scholarships.
Even if students don’t advance to careers in science, the experience of choosing a topic that interests them and designing an experiment goes a long way in building a passion for science, Haas said.
The Denver NorthStar
