this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Alternatively a few years later at my 96 school science fair, a kid made a website with Microsoft Frontpage and won first prize. The website was like, "Ryan's Website". I was so pissed. Like what part of the scientific method was applied to that project?
I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90's and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.
The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).
We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we'd get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn't do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.
We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.
<blink>gimme an A</blink>
Hypothesis: Judges are idiots impressed by shiny trinkets.
Methodology: literally just the source html from some random website, but edited witb my name.
Replace judges with people. This effect can be seen everywhere. Especially within professionals lacking Knowledge in some topic (but of course taking Part in discussions)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
Results: Coming in shortly.
We had a kid win the science fair because he wrote 2 paragraphs about the new solar panels that the school added. People had sculptures that must’ve taken weeks and he swept with a poster board. He truly was ready for academia.
My school had a kid build a computer for the science fair, and our science teacher was like "yeah, you basically just put together an expensive lego set." and gave him an "adequate" ribbon
In 2003 when I was in high we took a field trip to the international science and engineering fair. This is like the top level of the science fair only the "best" projects should be there. The only project I remember from that trip 21 years ago was the kid with the water cooled PC. At the time it was hot shit and I'm sure had some jank in it.
Are they wrong though? Unless the kid literally assembled his own PCBs, computers aren't that difficult.
In those days, PCs came with a crate of snall black connectors called jumpers, that you had to place in specific ways to arrange your IRQs and more.
Mainboard and BIOS settings were also not always configured with sane defaults, so it could be quite the puzzle.
God, I would've loved an adequate ribbon.
I hope your day was more than adequate 🙂
🥹 best day ever
Science fairs have always had this "World's Fair" like undercurrent. You're supposed to do actual science and be judged for that. But you can usually get very far with a clickbait-worthy hypothesis like "is it possible to..." or "what is the outcome of..." and ride on pure novelty and wow-factor. I've done both at the same time: eye-popping visuals with a provocative hypothesis, but with real R&D to back it up.
That's why I did "watching paint dry" as an actual science fair experiment. Tried putting paint in different environments to see how conditions actually effected the speed in which it dried.
Requires experimentation to backup a hypothesis with empirical data. Yeah it sounds boring, but had some fun with it regarding the different "environments" (like under heat lamp, with a fan, etc.)
I applaud your adherence to the scientific method. Amusingly, this is probably a lot closer to how science is conducted out in the professional world.
Yeah, not everything in science is super cool, but it is valuable to show why testing things out matters. Although it's not like the scientific community has been great about doing peer reviews anyways.
"For my science project I have chosen to peer review Jacob's paper on the smelliness of the boys restroom.
My review could find no hypothesis nor data collection in the original from which he concluded the different ways the vaguely described room smelled.
It is my conclusion that his passing grade was based on (1)having delivered some content on or before the deadline, (2) presenting various physical attributes under an accurately defined heading, and (3) minimum spelling mistakes.
I have illustrated these and other aspects by representing his paper with the teacher's markups.
I will be taking no questions at this time."
Oooh, savagely destroying bad projects from last year? Why didn't I think of this?!
Rigor is the bedrock of science.
We did a geocities website for our English assignment on "a tale of two cities" and got an A on it. I remember us using yahoo chat to work on it together. We were ahead of our time.
Pretty ironic choice in a topic on unfair judges.
Hah, I did that for a 6th grade English project where we had to do a tutorial on something. So I chose "how to make a website" and whipped up a quick page in Notepad.
Little did I know that the school computers were so locked down that I couldn't even open a local file in IE (the only browser we were allowed to use). They completely disabled the open and save dialogs and even Ctrl+O. Which was embarrassing as fuck cause it was a live demonstration and 12-year-old me didn't think to test it beforehand.
Still got an A, though. Most other kids did dumb things like "how to tie a shoe".