more on NASA Announces Results From Beam & Tether Challenges

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Comment re: Science Fairs in your Local School System


From: Kent Quirk
Date: October 25, 2005 10:47:47 PM EDT
more on [NASA Announces Results From Beam &
Tether Challenges]


What's sad about this is that just as we're seeing this level of
innovation in adults, we may be destroying it at the student level. I
had lunch today with a co-worker who occasionally assists in judging
the science fairs in his local school system. He was lamenting the
fact that because of various insurance and state regulations, he's
seeing fewer and fewer experiments and more and more research reports
done by poking around Google.

He pointed to several well-intentioned complications in the science
fair regulations:

* Students are forbidden from doing joint projects with teachers,
apparently to avoid the appearance of impropriety.

* Regulations forbid all experimentation on humans -- even such
things as blind taste tests. Throw out pretty much any experiment
having to do with perception.

* All experiments must be planned and documented and submitted to a
review committee in advance of doing them. You'd better know your
answers before you do the experiment. Students who learn by doing?
Sorry.

There are still independent competitions like the FIRST Robotics
competition, but the level of financial involvement required for
something like that excludes a lot of students.

Fortunately, we still have things like Make magazine and hackaday.com.

   Kent Quirk
   Software Architect
   http://www.cosmicblobs.com



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