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I was a finalist at the 2017 ISEF and it was quite an experience. A lot of super smart kids there and we all had fun living it up in Los Angeles.

There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations. No hate to high schoolers getting valuable STEM experience at local universities, but Regeneron should do more to differentiate between these different projects.

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I never judged ISEF, but it was highly predictable that the kids with university mentorship made it from my circuit to there. Felt really unfair to the smart self-motivated kids who didn’t have connections. IMO the fairs should take a much harder stance on this, as it defeats the spirit of such competitions.

People with connections have a leg up, but it's really not that hard to do it yourself. My parents were not researchers, we did not have connections, but I literally could emailed prof after prof showing my enthusiasm & knowledge I had gained already from my research until one decided to take a chance on me. I ended up publishing research with that connection I built which probably made a big difference for my college & grad school admissions. Most people just don't try this or give up too early or just didn't do the work to research on their own.

    > it's really not that hard to do it yourself
    > could emailed prof after prof

Ahh the usual "it worked for me, so it can't not work for you". coming from a researcher, I'd expect more skepticism.

> There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.

Love to see someone confirming my cynicism. In high school, a science teacher asked me if I were interested in doing something for the (then) Intel Talend Search. I looked up the previous finalists / winners and noticed that an overwhelming majority of the kids were in cities with top tier research universities (or did math stuff, those kids' locations varied a bit more). At that point, my spider sense told me that it wasn't worth the effort to try to compete without the backing / mentoring of a credentialed adult.

Honestly, in my country (the Netherlands) this whole attitude changed within 1 generation. My parents left met largely alone with my school stuff. Now I hear all my friends complaining that their kid's school "is so much work" for them.

Crazy right? When I ask them: Why help them at all (my kids are younger btw), they tell me that "sure we can just not help them, they won't make it into university (but something "lower"), whereas other kids that get help/coaching will."

It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean) and in a way these parents are also taking something away from their kids, namely the feeling that they made it on their own merit.

My generation is also known as "helicopter parents" and this is just another expression of it. Maybe because we have less kids later and those we have (often after fertility treatments) are our princesses and princes? Maybe because we have more time?

Unless something drastically changed in the education system the last ten years, I wonder where all that perceived workload is coming from.

Because 10 years back, the homework load, as expressed by the post high-school students I was hanging around with, was significantly lower than in some other European countries.

Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media. That's some serious amount of time, putting pressure on everything else.

I was always told: 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of leisure. Sure, you have eating and commuting etc. But people nowadays have to take those 5+ hours attention they're giving away from somewhere.

> Dutch youth is spending an average (!) of 5 hours and 45 minutes per day on digital media.

I was wondering if something like that was at play. Well, here are some hard statistics. Thank you for that.

> That's some serious amount of time

It's a worrying and disturbing amount of time.

Now, the question is: is more time wasted on digital media than was wasted on TV in the past?

And secondly: does the current TV time come on top of that, or has TV simply been displaced to other media, and is therefore fully included in the 5 hours and 45 minutes?

And thirdly: would anyone complain if children were spending 5 hours and 45 minutes a day reading books?

Watching television was much more toxic than digital media. Network television spoon fed content targeted at a lowest common denominator to everyone, that content was consumed passively. It was horrible.

Digital media allows active selection of content, and provides access to much higher quality information, if you want it.

Back in the day, you were lucky if your public library had even one book on a subject you were interested in, and if it did, it was probably mediocre at best. And highschool libaries? Pfft. Brittanica? Pathetic compared to Wikipedia.

Today, kids have instant access to all of human knowledge as digital media.

It's a false equivalency to compare TV time to digital media time.

> Unless something drastically changed in the education system the last ten years, I wonder where all that perceived workload is coming from.

In Europe? At least around here, in post-Soviet states, 10 years ago is about the time the first generation of people, who experienced the "good school -> good university -> good job" phenomenon on themselves, had kids reaching school age. The rat race is barely picking up steam over here; we're lagging a couple decades of social "progress" compared to our Western counterparts.

Your attitude will change as soon as you have an obviously smart pre-adolescent or adolescent kid, going through puberty and other hard times that come before and after, and deciding to viscerally reject school and study, as proxy for other hard upsetting things they have to deal with as you become an adult.

You ready to let them mess up their future, in the name of not being called an helicopter parent?

> It's a super bad trend because the parent won't be around after school (during their adult life I mean)

At least in North America, this has massively changed within a generation. By a lot. Virtually all of my social circle got help at a young age to buy big houses from their parents. Parents support kids for much longer. Kids live with their parents much longer.

So yeah, the parents are now always there for people my age (mid 20s).

Damn, none of my friends can even afford a house now, and there's definitely no parental help with _purchasing a home_. That's such an insanely large amount of money. Parents might help with kids from time to time but monetary assistance ended the moment we first graduated.

Correction: Regeneron is the sponsor, it is the Society for Science that is responsible. When I was there the sponsor was Intel, so I didn't immediately recognize the meaning of "Regeneron"

Heh now wait until you realize what it's like for kids coming from areas near the poverty line. I entered ISEF at a local level on a whim, my science teacher knew I was his brightest but didn't know what to do with me, I borrowed a rundown pair of shirt/slacks my dad retired from job interviews. The experience left such a deep mark on me that even now in the middle of a very successful tech career I remember it. I did a project on perceptrons which I learned about at the local community college library (from a copy of Mitchell's Machine Learning!) because my parents knew it kept weird 'ol me busy and off the streets. Fun times!

Not saying this phenomenon of having connections isn't true, but also, kinda unrelated to the issue here, no?

This kid plagiarized & had serious research misconduct. The fact that he has connections via his sister & dad is not the problem imo.

I agree that research misconduct is different than what I'm describing. I think that students who conduct serious research with local universities (for example) should be celebrated. But I do think the issues are related in that Regeneron needs to think about the (lack of) systems in place for vetting and supporting projects of all types.

I remember when I did science fair a long time ago and this was still true. I managed to get a few levels to the state science fair, but that was as far as I ever got. It was all about the best humidity conditions for popping popcorn with the fewest un-popped kernels and maximum volume.

Some of the other projects that I saw were just amazing. Even if the parents didn't help many of the top projects involved thousands of dollars of equipment that most students had no access to.

And no, other than maybe $100 from my parents, they didn't help at all.

Understanding the effect of humidity on popcorn making sounds like a fascinating research project. Also one that I can honestly imagine a high school student undertaking. I would like to know how you controlled humidity, what your popcorn making apparatus was, what conclusions you drew, can it really make my popcorn better, so many questions.

It seems so sad that we're taking projects that would be real fun---like yours---and comparing them to projects that clearly required massive amounts of infrastructure and external expertise. Now, again, both kinds of projects have their place: one to let students do genuine science, and the other for students to get an exposure to university research labs.

Why again are we turning science fairs into competitions and handing out awards and using them to filter college admissions? How many science fair entries report on failed experiments or admit that they didn't obtain statistically significant results? The whole thing reeks of misplaced incentives.

Aww shucks, thank you for the kind words.

I'd count out little dixie cups of 100 popcorn kernels each. Then I would weigh them and put them all in the laundry room, where the humidity was pretty constant for different time periods over a few months. I took another set of batches and heated them up in the oven for different periods of time. Then re-weigh to see how much moisture was lost from the kernels. Seeing that the amount of unpopped kernels and volume was pretty consistent between the fast drying and slow drying allowed me to predict what it might be like for years old popcorn by really drying out the kernels. I also did some batches in a high humidity environment using a box with a humidifier and seeing the weight gain from the moisture.

Everything was popped in an air popper to give everything that was going to pop the time to pop. Then count the unpopped kernels!

The overall conclusion is popcorn is probably good for up to a year, and you can do a lot better than the microwave bags if you buy loose popcorn. Generally more moisture helped, but there was a sweet spot range where there's enough moisture to have the steam make it pop big and open, but too much humidity made the casing soft and it would have just a kernel that was cracked but didn't pop.

The hardest part was coming up with a precision scale that could do two digits of precision. Basically everyone that used them then were either drug dealers or people who bought actual lab equipment.

Thank you for coming to my popcorn ted talk.

Oh and I forgot, this was when I was in 5th grade. Good times.

Nobody would enter the science fair if it didn’t provide a benefit to winning.

> Understanding the effect of humidity on popcorn making sounds like a fascinating research project.

It may also manifest in microwaves which "Popcorn" settings (well, when it's not a fraudulent feature) where monitoring moisture changes can help detect when a bad is done. (The fall-off in popping noises being another metric.)

I imagine this would just lead to it being more closely concealed.

> There was a stark contrast between those of us who had designed our projects completely ourselves, and those who had significant mentors/lab affiliations.

Said with kindness and discretion.

Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities. It has been for decades. I know firsthand that many Chinese-born parents don't even view it as at all wrong.

We are family friends with a Chinese national who did pretty well in this year's ISEF. They spent last summer back in mainland China at a private science fair camp where they prepped and prebuilt most of their project for the year. They are very bright, did a ton of real work, but had a large paid team behind them supporting and helping. They almost could have professional and amateur divisions at this point.

> Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities.

This has been a meme/running gag in countless sitcoms and Sunday morning newspaper comic strips for as long as I can remember. Not the Asian community part, just the 'parents actually doing the work' part. The joke is typically about overly competitive middle class suburban fathers juxtaposed against their children who have better things to do than care about dorky school projects.

The Cub Scout Pinewood Derby that I saw -- in which the kid is to carve a model car out of a block of wood at home, to race at an event -- they had wisely issued extra kits ahead of time, for those parents who would get a little too enthusiastic about helping Junior, and had separate races among the parents' cars.

Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks your child's brilliant future career.

As featured in South Park episode "Pinewood Derby" [1] [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinewood_Derby_(South_Park)

[2] https://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/oki0th/south-park-...

Also a (not south park) movie! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Derby

Do you need to have a child to get in on the parents segment of your cub scout's pinewood derby race? Asking for a friend.

I had the same thought. :) I don't know what they're doing now. (I saw it when my mom led a Cub Scout pack, decades ago.)

If you wanted to organize some competitions in your city, the track I saw would be easy to build. You might want to design it to break down for storage in someone's garage, and to fit in the back of a couple SUVs. Maybe get city approval to host events as a block party or at a park. Or pre-arrange to donate it to a parish that hosts Scouts and has room to store it and occasionally set it up in their school gym or coffee&donuts hall.

Today, you also have more RC vehicle competitions, and (over-media-ified) generations of battling homebrew robots.

That's frankly an amazing way to stem the number of enthusiastic parents doing their kid's projects. I wouldn't have thought of it.

Yep and this is a big problem. Because while the fraud in this article was clear cut… in many other cases there can be significant misrepresentation about the student’s actual novel contributions.

Unfortunately, many cultures don't see honesty as a value on its own. In Polish there's a word "frajer" which is an offensive term for someone who got cheated or didn't take advantage of a situation. The logic is that, if the society as a whole is dishonest, then it doesn't make sense to be a martyr recognized by no-one, and it's better to make sure you take care of yourself first.

Fun fact: that's actually a Yiddish word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/frajer

English translation: dope, sucker. As in there's a sucker born every minute: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There%27s_a_sucker_born_every_...

Fun fact: according to the etymology I could find online it's actually originally a German word (meaning client of a prostitute) that was borrowed by Yiddish, then borrowed in turn by Polish from Yiddish and also ended up in a couple of other European languages.

Yiddish is a German language.

Similar word also exists in standard German, where it originally meant "f*cker" but now just means a man who buys services from a prostitute.

Freier is not F*cker, just someone who needs to pay for sex, and is more independent then

Also, 'chutzpah' which has a sense of being proud of trying to get away with it, unashamed.

The word is widely used in Russian as well.

Reminds me about covid time math competition. It had to be taken online. Usually maximum score can be reached by less than a dozen of students, but when competition was online there were over 3000 math geniuses

https://wiadomosci.onet.pl/kraj/koronawirus-gigantyczne-rozb...

Unfortunately very similar to Uruguay, where I grew up. One of the many reasons I haven't lived there for a while now :(

To pile on top: also pretty similar to Brazilian culture where following the rules will be looked down as being stupid (since everyone else isn't abiding by them, you doing it is considered as self-handicapping).

One of my least favourite features of Brazil and definitely in the top 3 reasons why I left the country more than a decade ago.

In Czech Republic, under communism, they used to say:

    "If you are not stealing from the state, you are stealing from your own family."

Many many years ago I participated in a national history competition and went to nationals. The participants were almost entirely white, and there was absolutely this "well its obvious the parents didi this" thing there too.

due to growing up in cut throat dog eat dog culture, a lot of people from asia don't really teach their kids about ethics and morality even whilst living in western societies, many times they encourage the opposite.