Science (Un)Fair

I hated science fairs when I was in school. Nothing about it appealed to me. The coming up with an original idea. The experimentation. The laws of nature to support it. Even the format…hypothesis, research, experiment, findings, conclusion. Nothing that I ever attempted was successful, or rather, nothing I thought would happen did. So I cheated. I didn’t pay some poindexter to do it for me. Instead, I fudged my results and invented data. Sometimes I was successful in my charade, other times I just got by. One year I just made up the whole thing, the night before it was due. I faked my graphs, concocted measurements, and supported it all with three house plants of different ages. And once, I decided to see if I could get away with not doing it at all, as if it would go unnoticed that I never turned in a project. It did not go unnoticed, but I did find out that I was able to get a good grade, a B, even if I did not turn in the assignment. It was my most successful science fair experiment ever. Science was the first class in which I earned less than an A. It was not my friend, and it still isn’t. In fact, it seems to have exacted its revenge on me, as most things do, through my children.

This week is the science fair in my daughters’ class. I call it science fair, but their teacher calls it “Invention Convention,” which I think is what middle schoolers do in an effort to boost their interest in an engineering career. At our school, the first and second graders present a science project, while the third graders are required to invent something. The fair takes place outside, so the students cannot use electricity, and they have to understand the scientific concepts behind their invention. They also have to promise to adhere to safety practices, and they have to research their creation to ensure that their invention does not currently exist. Did I mention they were in the third grade?

S, who is in the first grade, had it easy. We just looked around the kitchen and came up with the brilliant idea to grow mold on some different kinds of food. Sounds simple enough, grab some food, slap it in a few Ziplocs, and see how it looks at the end of the week. A few Google searches on mold, a tri fold poster board, and we can call it a week. But it is so much more complicated than that. First, we had to pick foods that she won’t be disgusted by at the end of the week and thus never eat them again. She opted for bread, cheese, and an apple. Well, she wanted to do a strawberry, but I encouraged the apple because she eats strawberries, not apples. I figured why ruin more food choices from her already limited repertoire? We even went with a cheese she doesn’t like, for the same reason. And a slice of bread, innocent enough. We bagged them. We observed them every day. She wrote notes, I took pictures. We waited for something to happen. Day 1, 2, 3, 4. Nothing. A little brown on the apple, but nothing like over the course of dinnertime. So the science hater in me tried to intervene. I opened the bags. I sat them in the sunlight. I brought them upstairs when I showered, hoping the moist air would spark some growth S could observe and present. But no dice. Nothing happened. The bread looks fresh from the bakery. The apple is still golden delicious. The cheese is a little ripe, but not furry or discolored. What kind of boring failed experiment is that? It’s a good thing she doesn’t get grades yet. The only real experiment we conducted all week was keeping the cats from chewing through the bags. And the only conclusion I drew, besides I still hate science, is that winter is a bad time to try to grow mold.

But as piss poor of a scientist I am, I am an even worse engineer. E’s project began with a bunch of brain storming in the car, trying to think of anything she could invent that we could actually make. She is 9, after all, and sometimes doesn’t understand that what you want to make might not happen without a team of engineers and a manufacturing facility. We did, after all, want her work to look like, if not actually be, her own, as opposed to the rest of the class, which was making things like solar powered robots that looked like cat toys, and clearly had lots of parent intervention. She decided on a basketball that would be used for dribbling practice, since she is currently playing on a team and is the only novice member of her team who doesn’t have much in the way of skills. She called it “dribble ball,” and it was based on a paddleball, but without the paddle. The basketball was to have a hole drilled into it, into which was inserted a length of elastic. The other end of the elastic would have a loop for your wrist. You slip the look around your wrist, attempt to dribble, and when your attempt fails, the ball is still there instead of flying down the driveway into oncoming traffic. Problem solved!

Except for one thing. When you drill a hole in a basketball and insert a length of elastic into that hole , it no longer is a firm air tight basketball. Instead, it looks more like a used douche bag, circa 1963. We tried a tire repair kit, a vinyl patch, some gorilla glue, and some sort of substance from my husband’s dental practice. Nothing will plug that fucker up. So her clever invention, which she will have to demonstrate to four classes of preschoolers and some super-devoted parents, is about as successful as her sister’s super mold resistant bread slice. We sent her to school with a bike pump and explicit instructions not to let anyone test out the dribble ball.

Honestly, I don’t care that it didn’t work, that it looked like it was made by Wayne Szalinski, that it isn’t a home fission kit or an engineering feat. All I care about is that the science fair is over for another year. Now the cats can go back to their favorite pastime of ripping open any unattended snack bags on the counter, and my kitchen no longer looks like the Mutter museum. I wonder if they have a douche bag exhibit there. Perhaps I can send them our home version for their collection.