The envelope, please.

Yesterday I had a somewhat different role to play - Science Fair Judge! I originally got connected with this event two years ago through one of the research staff here in CIS. She knew of a science fair in Geneseo looking for volunteers to judge the submissions. I volunteered, but was assigned to judge kindergarten kids - so while I thought it was fun to participate, I did not consider it a worth while use of my work time (what kind of return could I possibly expect on that investment?). So last year I skipped it, but when the calls to volunteer came around this year I must have been feeling more generous or something, because I stepped up. This time I requested to judge 8th graders, so at least there would be a chance for me to slip in some nods to CIS/RIT and consider an afternoon outside the office legitimate work.

There were about a dozen projects submitted by 8th graders, about half of them to do with astronomy in some way. As it turns out, they had recently done a unit in their science class about astronomy, so many of them pursued it for their exhibits. Projects spanned from the big bang, to gravitational forces, to craters, to constellations, to the Coriolis effect. Other non-astronomical projects included map making, pressurized potato gun building, erosion studies, and a study into people's likelihood to pick up litter on the street. The projects were graded via a rubric with items pertaining to the display, knowledge of the student, and presentation skills, but we were able to qualitatively choose our winners at the end based on overall performance. This fair is a little different, though, in that students had various types of exhibits they could choose from: research and present, experiment, build something, and one other I can't remember but which was not done by any of the 8th graders anyways. While this approach is interesting and broadens the scope of projects students can do, I do not think it is conducive to fair judging - no matter what, a fully thought out experiment with a question, research, hypothesis, data collection, analysis, and conclusion is pretty much always going to prove most impressive and thorough. And, it did - But I can't get into specifics about who won, because I'm not sure when the results are being announced! So for now, they are still in a sealed envelope (literally - that's how we submitted the winners).

Anyways, I was able to throw in a few shameless plugs for Imaging Science, our intern program, the Sustainability college, and ImagineRIT, so all in all I think my job was done!

This was not one of my exhibits to judge (it was by younger kids), but I appreciated its Image Microstructure subject matter. If only the 8th graders did anything so Imaging Science-related, my ulterior motives would have been way easier to act upon...

Appreciation card and chocolate! holla