Grants and Science Fair

Next year, I am opening up science fair to my low-track ecology students. I think that completing a science fair project will be a good experience for them, and I have plenty of room in the curriculum to support them in class.

One of my concerns was getting supplies for the projects. In my gifted class, I offer very little in the way of supplies. Students know when they design their project that they need to get their own supplies. If they need some specialized lab equipment they can stay after school with me and use departmental stuff, but we don’t typically supply them with anything consumable. This class has higher than average SES, for the most part, so it’s really a non-issue.

This is not true for my ecology students, most of whom are on free/reduced lunch. The $20-50 spent by the parents of the gifted students is really out of the question for many of the families in my ecology class. 

Last week I received a small grant—$300—for STEM projects in the classroom. I brainstormed what to do with it, and here is what I came up with:

  1. Establish an account for science fair supplies for my ecology kids
  2. Students will submit their own grant proposal
  3. The grant proposal will list all the supplies they need and a budget, along with a research plan and an explanation of why this project is worth funding
  4. Then I can use my little account to order whatever the kids need

I’m pretty excited about this idea. Students could present their grant proposals to a “board”—myself, and I could ask a couple of colleagues to “review” the proposals with me to make it more authentic for the students. Plus Common Core writing/speaking standards!

It needs to be next year already so I can start using all of my new ideas.

Science Fair Wrap-Up

  • Display boards all graded
  • 47 papers left to grade
  • 4 out of the top 5 projects came from my classes, including the first place finisher
  • 12 of the 20 projects moving on to the county science fair came from my classes
  • And so I agreed to work the county fair, which is on a Saturday morning
  • I screwed up the project numbers for my classes somehow, which really threw a wrench in M’s carefully planned schedule. We mostly worked it out but there were a few glitches.
  • Met with some parents today—some that had volunteered to work as judges, and some that came after school to browse the projects. Mostly positive.
  • There is one parent who is still upset that his son has me and not the older bio teacher who used to do gifted. The first thing this parent said to me at orientation in August was, “No, my son is in gifted so he is supposed to have Mrs. V.” This parent spent most of today asking about Mrs. V, who celebrated her first year of not having to run science fair by taking a personal day. He also expressed to M that he was disappointed that his son had me instead of Mrs. V. WTF? His son loves my class and has been doing great all year. Sigh.
  • This same parent later took the time to tell me and M that we need to teach our kids statistical analysis in order to help them create more rigorous studies. It is certainly a valid point, but his proposal made it abundantly clear that he does not spend his days trying to make it through a rigorous, ridiculously paced curriculum with ninth graders who have minimal math and no chemistry or physics to speak of.
  • But overall the judges were great—very enthusiastic and thoughtful. They seemed to really like talking with the kids about the projects.

Time to start pulling together materials for the students who are going on to county. I’ll need to stay after school with them sometime soon to help them prepare.

Damn science fair. 

But I did get to spend all of today being proud of my kids and all of their hard work.

Students are sending me seriously last minute panic e-mails about their science fair projects.

Don’t tell me twelve hours before your data is due that you “just realized” you have 6 data points instead of the recommended 50.

Also, if you need help with the calculations, provide me with some context. An e-mail that says only: “to find the average for my data would i add the amount of points earned out of 12 and divide that by 25 or add up the percentages out of 100 and divide that by 25?” is utterly meaningless to me. Your project is one of about 25 that I have to track and quite frankly I do not recall the finer points of the hastily scribbled raw data tables you handed in two weeks ago.

I will be way more excited than the kids when this damn science fair is finally over. Fellow GT science teacher and I already have the drinking plans in order.