Information for competing in the Alice Smith Invitational Science Fair

The idea of the Alice Smith Invitational Science Fair is to give students a challenging extension activity they can take as far as they like; ideally producing work they can be proud of discussing at university interviews and in personal statements. 

It is also designed to provide an entry way for students who are not yet at that point; an opportunity to extend their science understanding outside of the classroom in whatever way their passion dictates. 

These two concepts are covered by the two strands of the Science Fair, named after two famous explorers:

Livingstone is for students to re-enact or review something they have heard about or seen. This could be doing an experiment they’ve seen or heard about online, a demonstration, ‘library’ research or informational projects, and/or ‘explanation’ models. 

Shackleton is a more rigorous project giving a student researcher the opportunity to engage in authentic scientific research or engineering practice and to share their experiences and findings with others. Students may try to recreate an investigation to see if it holds true in a specific environment, for example, or do their own unique investigation into whatever their passions and interests dictate. 

Expectations for each school

Each school that wishes to partake in the Alice Smith Invitational Science Fair needs to run their own internal Science Fair following the same guidelines to what is found here. 

This website should be viewed as a resource; all literature here is public and can be taken by each school to inform their own internal fair. If pdf copies are required please contact Francesco Corbetta and he will provide them. 

The idea is that the best projects from each internal fair be represented at the Alice Smith Invitational Science Fair to celebrate our students' hard work. This will be another great experience for our students to attend. In order for exam classes to attend, it is targeted that this event will be held in March with the exact date to be determined once schools have provided availability. This means that each school would need to hold their fair before the end of February.

Rules

The rules were taken from the International Science and Engineering Fairs (ISEF) guidelines. This means they should be robust and cover most scenarios. You are free to adapt them for your school, however these will be the rules used for the final fair, please keep that in mind. 

Ideally, over the next few years, we would aim to get this Science Fair certified by the ISEF as an official fair. This would mean that the winners would be eligible to travel to America to compete in the global finals which would be an amazing experience and give them a chance of winning some incredible prizes. 

Next Steps

If you're interested in competing please fill out this form. This will also invite you to join a Zoom on 13th October at 16.00, where you can ask any questions you may have.