I've been staying out of the discussion on science fairs because in
spite of having been a child once myself, and having 4 children of my
own now, yet my only experience with such fairs consists of one time
that I was asked to be a judge in an elementary school fair. My role
consisted mainly of going around looking at various lemon battery
projects. This led me to suspect these fairs have a large amount of
cookbook science.
I just got thinking though about something that I do have experience in
- music fair competitions for children. I took part in such from grades
2-5. The thing that strikes me is that I was given a song, asked to
practice it and then sing it in front of judges. Older kids had
competitions such as sight reading. The fairs were broken into
categories so that judges didn't have to compare my singing with
somebody else's drum playing. However good or bad such a fair is, I
wonder what would happen if it was replaced with fairs where all the
participants were told was that "real musicians" use the "musical
method" to compose, orchestrate and perform their own music. I expect
that a few good things would happen that cannot happen in the highly
restricted format of the fairs I was in, however it would be a shambles
overall. It strikes me that this is the state that science fairs seem
to be in. Removing the idea of a "scientific method" would certainly
have some advantages, however what semblence or order would then remain?
I see science as a process rather than a method, and a process which
proceeds in a spiral type of fashion with many individual parts. Nobel
prizes are won for work which doesn't include all these parts, so why
should we insist on them in science fairs for kids? In music I
practiced scales not because that's all there is to music or even
because I would ever perform them before an audience, but as a part of
acquiring the basic skills of a musician. In the same way we teach kids
things like the "scientific method" not because that defines science but
because the habits developed are a part of the basic skill set of a
scientist.
I am actually not opposed to having seen all those lemon batteries.
This falls into the same class as my practicing and then performing a
prescribed song in the music fair. Looking at the projects and talking
to the kids I could see there was much age-appropriate science learned
and much basic intuition shown by some of the kids (comparing series and
parallel connections, comparing the electrode configurations such as
whether the lemon membranes separated them). All of this can be
considered a success, depending on the goals of the fair organizers. I
suspect that holding science fairs because you *should* rather than
because of some defined goals is the root of the problem. Tell me what
the goals are, then I can tell you whether all those lemon battery
projects was a good thing or not.