I served as a judge for a middle & high school science competition event last Saturday. It is conducted by an organization called PJAS (Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Sciences) setup to promote science education among school students. See http://www.pjas.net. I went in for the first time last year. Thought it was a good experience and a nice opportunity to do some volunteer work for the community and so signed on this year again. There were more than 120 judges and 1200+ student participants (~600 students in the morning and another ~600 in the afternoon sessions).
The entire state of PA gets segmented to into dozen regions, each covering multiple county/district schools. In the morning session middle school students (7 & 8th graders) presented their findings. Afternoon session was for high school students. Though it is not necessarily original research, the process gives students a good overview of how research is conducted in science. With the help of a mentor, they choose a topic (you can find a list of supported subject areas here), develop a question, pose a hypothesis, conduct tests, analyze the data, make a conclusion as to whether the hypothesis is supported or rejected, put together a presentation describing their project and present it in this forum. While individual schools may hold science exhibition like events where students give demonstrations, in this event they are required to make only a presentation using transparencies (no 3-D models/aids or show & tell allowed). This helps keep the format consistent and fairly fail proof.
Interestingly the morning session where middle school kids present, had better quality projects both last year and this year compared to afternoon session where high schoolers present. This appears to be due to couple of reasons:
- Middle school students are not required to participate in this event and so those who do are genuinely interested smart kids doing this voluntarily with enthusiasm. On the other hand several high schools make it compulsory diluting the quality of student pool.
- After seeing middle school presentations in the morning, my expectation for high school presentations probably goes up. :-)
- With so many high school students trying to participate quality of mentoring also probably goes down.
Areas like Physics, Chemistry and Behavioral Science seem to attract a lot of participants, each with more than 70 students. Computer Science and Math had abysmal participation with just 2 each in the morning and less than a dozen in the afternoon. In the morning I went to judge a behavioral science session with 12 participants. One seventh grader in this session had bought 4 calculators, opened them up herself and rewired + with multiplication, - with division, etc. She then recruited student subjects to take a math test that will require a calculator and gave them these rigged calculators to see how quickly boys & girls recognize that there is something wrong with the calculator. This is to study gender based differences in observational skills. I thought this was a good/clever experiment for a seventh grade girl to conceive and conduct. Interestingly she found that her male student subjects found that the calculator is broken far quickly compared to her female students. I was joking that perhaps the girls didn't even need a calculator to complete the test and so never bothered to use them. :-)
In the afternoon went to judge a session on Ecology. A high school student in this session wanted to see if a water stream used as a source for potable water is contaminated by nearby plants releasing pollutants. Very valid idea for an ecology related study. But he simply called a water testing company, sent them just one sample set and reported their test result saying the water is clean. Looks like the mentor didn't explain the need for good sample size, importance of designing and doing the tests yourself, varying variables in the experiment, etc.
I heard about another 8th grader in the morning session who had built a scaled 3D model of a house to see how green a house can be, used enough thermal insulation & drywall material, installed multiple temperature sensors around the model, collected readings using a microprocessor, wrote FPGA code, analyzed the results using Excel (resorting to sliding window approach as the number of data points he had gathered exceeded a million overwhelming MS Excel), etc..!! So, there was a wide range in the quality of work presented. Still considering the fact that when I finished high school I hardly knew what posing a hypothesis meant, this whole exercise is commendable.
This event has all the ingredients you need to make it very chaotic:
- It is held in a high school that most participants have never been into before (i.e. new large building, you don't know which room you need to go to, where the rest room is, etc.).
- There are 100+ judges who are new to the school as well.
- Presentations take place in about 50 to 60 parallel sessions in different class rooms simultaneously.
- Each room has about dozen students presenting and 2 or 3 judges. 10 mins for presentation followed by ~5 mins of Q&A.
- Whole thing is repeated in the afternoon for high school students.
- Packets need to be put together for each judge with evaluation rubric, instruction hand outs, programs, participants list, stop watch for one lead judge to time the presentations, and so forth
- Judges/participants may not show up at the last minute.
- Winter weather
- Providing free lunch for all the judges, selling lunches for everyone else, etc.
Despite all these factors, it went off without any hitch, people showed up at the right time, judges' orientation got over as per schedule, there were enough people guiding judges/participants to the correct rooms, all the participants were ready in the correct room exactly on time, we submitted our results and left the premises earlier than expected..! Need to learn these organization skills.
There were more than a dozen judges from LSI alone. An astute friend & colleague who accompanied me for the first time as a judge made a good but subtle observation. When we attend a presentation in the office, we usually ask follow up questions to get our doubts cleared so that we understand the contents of the presentation well. He said material the students presented were all easy to understand and so he didn't have any questions initially. His co-judge who has been doing this for the past 15 years or so, kept asking a lot of questions. Soon he realized that the purpose of co-judge's questions is not for him to understand the presentation better but to enrich the students & push/encourage them to think more. In the end he came out with a recalibrated view of attending presentations.
Thus, in more than one way, we learned a thing or two in exchange for our Saturday. :-)
-sundar.
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