Virgil

Just completed my stint as a judge. No not for a reality TV talent show. No I’m not the next Simon Cowell. This is the third year now (not successive, I had to miss one year in the past four years) I’ve participated as a virtual judge for a national science and engineering contest for sixth through ninth graders. That’s eleven through fourteen year olds.

I don’t judge everyone in the contest, so I don’t see all the entries. I judge about ten entries, and if they need more scored and I have time they might ask me to do a few more. It takes about a half hour an entry, so it’s not a burden, just a few hours, and I’m usually scoring right up until the deadline, not from lack of interest but because I’m unusually busy for some reason in March. The kids are cute and their efforts are usually endearing.

There were some good ones this year. One seventh grade team tried to assess which foods to eat to perform better on tests. They researched the ones that were singled out as helpful and ones that were hindrances, added a neutral control candidate, and then had students eat these foods and try to solve puzzles. Now this wasn’t the most splashy experiment (and you can say it’s somewhat suspect) but what impressed me was their methodology. They had positive and negative variables, a control variable, multiple trials, and a good statistical analysis of their data. Their adviser must have guided them well. So if it means anything, eat cucumbers before a test.

An eighth grade team designed a backpack that doesn’t hurt the back. They tried to understand where the load on the shoulders and back should be and designed accordingly, or so they said. And for good measure they added two battery powered massagers toward the lower back interface point. They only got an average score from me. They had no criteria as to what constituted a better backpack, and so their conclusion was based on a couple of people telling them it was better than a store bought one.

The one project that really impressed the heck out of me was a seventh grade team that made paper from grass. Yes, actual paper, and they took four different types of grass and assessed which made the best paper. They had pictures of the process and the resulting product, submitted emails of team discussions, and the data from the experiment. They judged the quality of the paper (and therefore which grass was best to use) by how ink bled on the paper. I can almost imagine a straight laced thirteen year old girl in charge of this team because of comments like this. “The documents were proof read to perfection and turned in” and “Each member was respectful towards one another (Note chain emails).” LOL, they get points for grammar and spelling and for team work. (I remember one year where the submission told about a fight between the one who wrote it and another team member.) Unfortunately for the grass team I had to short them a few points because they judged the quality of the paper on one process for each grass. It’s quite possible that one grass could have been improved with a little bit different manufacturing process, which could have changed their conclusion. In retrospect I probably should have let that sly. They really put some good work in there.

All the entries weren’t all that impressive. An eighth grade class decided to assess whether physical therapy for pets was beneficial. They helped do physical therapy on a dog at a veterinarian and when they finished and the dog looked happy they called it a success. Another tried to come up with a transition program to help ease the stress on sixth graders entering junior high school. They sent out questionnaires to identify issues but apparently the respondents didn’t understand a key question. Oh well. I was no Simon. I was kind.

Hope they all do better next year. I wish I had participated in something like this at that age.