Thursday, February 21, 2008

 

This lovely set of science fair photos made me laugh and laugh. My science fair memories are both precious and deeply painful. There was my totally-phoning-it-in "Which of these five things makes plants grow bigger?" experiment, which followed an ambitious but underappreciated experiment involving rates of decay of various household garbage items in biodegradeable versus non-biodegradeable garbage bags, aka The Most Disgusting Experiment Ever. I do remember seeing some very silly experiments upon taking a turn around my 7th and 8th grade science fairs, including stuff on astrology and crime and the phases of the moon and whatnot. Oh, and of course there are always those two or three kids whose parents just happen to be executives at the CDC or Boeing or something, and whose experiments involve putting nanotech in manatees and using them to cure cancer. I continue to believe, to this day, that the results of my middle school science fairs are invalid, due to a failure to control for both (1) effect of previous fairs on each individual child's interest in science and (2) parental access to supercolliders, DNA labs, and/or live dolphins.

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