East TX Regional Science Fair

January 17th, 2024

Science Fair people-

I hope projects are coming along well.  Remember: The registration deadline (which includes uploading your digital posters) is Feb 2, 2024.

Just another quick tip: The new webpage for the East Texas Regional Science Fair is https://www.kilgore.edu/science-fair

You can also get there using

https://www.kilgore.edu/east-texas-regional-science-fair-2

The ISEF rules for 2024 are included as a link at the bottom of that page.  There is also a link in those rules to the forms that you may need to include with your poster.

Paul Buchanan

January 9th, 2024

Science Fair people-

One further bit of information: The digital project boards for the East Texas Regional Science Fair should be uploaded to two locations.  The official submission is done by uploading a copy of the digital board (see the template I sent several times earlier) as a pdf file via e-mail to sciencefair@kilgore.edu.  Maintenance has been done on this e-mail and it is now ready for the 2024 digital project boards.  The filename for boards must include the school name and students’ last names.  Example: Lufkin Middle School - Gaylord Stockly Eberhard.  Remember, each school is allowed ten project submissions.  As a backup, you should also submit to our google account as a pdf with the same filename.  Our google account is easttexasregionalsciencefair@gmail.com.

By the way, some of you may want information about parking busses, vans, and cars the day of the fair.  Unfortunately, the parking lot that we have previously used is being used for another purpose at the moment.  I am working with our police department to determine the best place to park and I will send that information in the next few days as soon as it is finalized.

Paul Buchanan

Science Fair people,

I hope you had a restful Thanksgiving.

A quick update about the East Texas Regional Science Fair: Dec 2 (Saturday) is the deadline for submitting a Research Plan on STEMWizard for your science fair projects.  That will also require that you complete your Project Information page for each project.  I’ve noticed that a few projects do not have a recorded teacher or school on their Information page.  Please make sure the teacher in charge has been registered in STEMWizard.  Some teachers haven’t sent me their information so that I can register them.  Without this information the students cannot designate a teacher or a school.  This will be important in the judging and advancing of projects to TxSEF.  If these aren’t designated, it’s difficult (and may be impossible) to determine where these projects come from and whether they can advance to TxSEF.  I will be out of town on Friday (and part of Thursday) so please provide this information to me by Wednesday.

It looks like we will have quite a few projects this year.  There are already almost 150 projects in the process of completing their information page and research plan.  That includes almost 200 students.  Hence, it looks like we may have a very competitive regional science fair.

Templates: Jennifer Stover asked about the templates for project posters.  I have not heard anything about changes or updates to the templates we’ve used for a couple of years.  However, I’ve asked the TxSEF people whether they are expecting any changes.  I will let you know if they have any comments about this issue.  I’ve attached a copy of the last template that I have to this message as well as the judging rubric.  Since TxSEF sometimes has changes right before their fair, I may not have the latest version from last year.  If anyone has any more recent templates let me know and I will distribute.

By the way, I have updated our contact list so, hopefully, everyone relevant will receive this e-mail.

Paul Buchanan pbuchana@kilgore.edu 

Director, East Texas Regional Science Fair USTX06

October 23rd, 2023

Science Fair people-

The video of our meeting with Zach from STEMWizard seems to have expired.  However, one of the other regional science fairs has recently created the videos below to help with learning how to input students, etc.  The one labeled ‘Students’ is especially useful. 

Teachers: https://vimeo.com/860672486?share=copy

Students: https://vimeo.com/860687432?share=copy

Paul Buchanan

October 13th, 2023

Science Fair people-

I hope this finds you well.  I have input quite a number of teachers into the STEMWizard platform.  Please let me know ASAP if you have additional teachers that will need to be set up in the platform to input students.  I can see that some of you are busy inputting student projects already.  Remember, the East Texas Regional Science Fair (ETRSF) is on Friday, Feb 9, 2024.  The registration deadline is Feb 2, 2024.  This, in essence, in most cases, means that you will need to input all project information into STEMWizard by this date.  We will also have an ETRSF email (same as last year) to submit material as a back-up.  I will send more details about that later.

Remember also, all projects must abide by the ISEF experimentation and project rules.  Links to the 2024 rules are available on our webpage (www.kilgore.edu/science-fair).  We are still updating info on that page as it had to be completely rebuilt recently.  However, the link to the rules is there and is accessible.  Please read these rules as, in the past, one of the most serious problems with student projects has been that teachers and coordinators did not read them and students undertook projects that were not compatible with these rules.  Projects that do not meet these rules will not be able to advance to TxSEF.  Also, remember, human participant studies must be approved by your IRB before experimentation begins.  Also, from a practical perspective, certain types of projects must be approved by your SRC before experimentation (for example, projects using certain types of chemicals, etc).

How is STEMWizard working for you?  Have you found any problems or glitches in the platform? From my experience, it seems to be much easier to use than Scienteer.  However, I’m interested in hearing what the teachers who are using it think.  As far as I know, we will be using the same facilities for the actual fair and it will be an in-person fair.

Also, if you know of any schools or teachers or homeschooled students that would benefit from participating in our fair, please forward our information to them.  We would like to expand the number of students participating.

Dr. Paul Buchanan

Director

August 3rd, 2023

Science Fair people-

As you may remember, the science fair platform for all of Texas is changing this year.  The previous platform, Scienteer, is disappearing and it will be replaced by STEM Wizard.  To allow you to register your students on this platform, we will need to set up your teachers and schools in the system.  If you are a teacher that plans to register students this year (or, if your school will have a coordinator that registers all students), please send me your name, e-mail address, phone number, division (Junior 6-8 or Senior 9-12), and school name.  If everyone provides this information soon, we will try to get this done fairly early, so that you will be able to complete in a reasonable time-frame.

Paul Buchanan

Director, East Texas Regional Science Fair

July 24th, 2023

Science Fair people,

I hope this finds you well and you are having a great summer.  A quick update on the platform that we will use for the 2024 science fair:  TxSEF and the regional science fairs have come to a decision about the platform that Texas fairs will use for the 2024 fairs.  Scienteer will be replaced by STEM Wizard.  STEM Wizard was specifically designed by science fair participants in Kentucky a few years ago and it has features that interface really well with the ISEF requirements.  You may want to review the specifics of this platform at their website (https://www.stemwizard.com/).  That will make it easier for you to convert when it becomes available.  We’re not sure exactly when that will be, but I will let you know details as soon as I know.  We haven’t yet ‘paid’ for the rights, so we can’t yet ‘use’ the platform.  One thing to note: You will need to know details of ISEF rules to be able to include the proper forms for each individual science fair project.  This will be especially important for senior projects.  If the proper forms are not included in the projects, they will be disqualified.  On the other hand, there has been the suggestion that the Junior level projects use a simpler group of forms for the regional fairs.  However, that will require that junior-level projects revise their projects (and include the standard ISEF forms) somewhere along the way before they can be entered in either TxSEF or ISEF (to be determined).  That really means that the rules for not culturing bacteria at home and the rules dealing with human participant (and other vertebrate animal and dangerous chemicals) studies will remain the same.  It’s also not completely clear if you will be able to register projects before the school fairs or only after your winners have been declared.  I will let you know as soon as it’s clear to me.  Just remember this: It’s better for students to design their projects early this year (preferably in September) so that any delays in registration etc can be minimized.

As usual, since every year there are new faculty and movement of faculty from one school to another, please forward this message to anyone you think might need it.  We would like to expand our outreach to as many schools in our region as possible.

Paul Buchanan