Science-Fair to Middling
Last week I was a judge for a middle-school science fair. It was mildly entertaining, seeing the traditional projects involving burning things and playing with blood. Nothing really compelling though. The most disappointing aspect of the fair was the lack of any really scientific hypotheses. It was painful to read some of these hypotheses. In general, I was pretty sad about the students’ lack of understanding of the scientific method.
“Ammonia is a better blood cleaner than X because ammonia is a popular household cleaning agent” is not a scientific hypothesis. “Bottled Water X has more minerals in it than Bottled Water Y does,” is at least testable, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about physical processes. And most of the students didn’t spend much time considering what controls to use in their experiments, so that they could verify whether their results actually meant anything. If you are going to test two different blood cleaning agents, you might want to also try plain old water. If you are going to measure the mineral content of water, you might want to also try distilled water, and water with a high mineral concentration, to see whether your measuring process behaves as you would expect.
I guess the reason this bums me out so much is that there is a really widespread lack of understanding of the scientific process, and both its strengths and its limitations. Since this was a middle-school science fair, the students were acting on what the teacher had explained about the scientific process: what is a valid and testable hypothesis, what controls would make sense for a given experiment, and so forth.
“Using metric units instead of Imperial units” does not make an experiment more scientific either. You can do great science using furlongs, roods, and stones, as long as your measurements are accurate and well-documented!
Oh well. Enough ranting about “kids these days…” It almost makes me want to give a “What is science?” lecture to some people, but not quite…
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
What I am curious about is where they got the blood from and why the need to find the best cleaner. Perhaps as a judge you should have been nervous and gave them first place for your own personal safety!
March 3rd, 2008 at 12:35 pm
Well, you know the mind of 12-year-old boys. But the blood didn’t even come from an interesting place - and it wasn’t even really blood. He got his “blood” by buying some red meat and getting the juices from the meat. Which everybody knows is red because of myoglobin and not hemoglobin… sheesh. Not to mention the absence of plasma and all the other stuff in blood.