A science project is a ticket to college

Any child can do what Thomas

"Ha, this is not true if I want to go to KU!" any school student can say. He will be right: to be admitted to KU he should have a GPA of 2.0 (all Cs is OK), or an ACT score of 21, or an SAT score of 875, or be in the top third of the class. Nothing is said about science projects.

However, KU is a state university. It is not fair, but an engineer with a degree from MIT, Berkley, Cal Tech, or any of the other top 10 colleges will have much a higher chance of being invited to an interview even if his resume will be one of a hundred for one opening. A KU graduate might be as good an engineer as an MIT graduate, but again one with a KU diploma should prove that he is a good engineer while one with an MIT diploma does not need to. On the contrary, it should be proven that one with an MIT diploma is not as good as a KU graduate.

On the other hand, standard and high definition digital television was developed at MIT (together with RCA, Zenith, and other major TV manufacturers). The Global Positioning System (GPS) was developed at Stanford. GPS is needed for navigation of ships, aircraft, and even cars and trucks. Many luxury cars have GPS based navigation systems. Low-cost GPS based automatic landing systems for airplanes was also developed at Stanford. Seventeen Nobel laureates are on faculty at Stanford, not counting numerous Stanford alumni who became Nobel laureates while working at other universities or corporations.

If a KU graduate usually receives $40-50,000 per year at start, the top-ten-college student receives $80-90,000.

Everything listed above makes MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc. very attractive for high school graduates around the globe, and the mentioned colleges are highly selective because of this.

Admission requirements are very high there: one should have a GPA of about 4.0 (straight As), an almost perfect SAT score, and be in the top ten of the class. Even in this case, nobody can be sure that he will be accepted. For instance, in 2000 a graduate of Prairie Village high school had a perfect SAT score of 1600, but was not accepted by Stanford or MIT. In this case prize-winning science projects can play a crucial role.

Admission officers at all colleges know that straight A students are not always the best students. If their parents can afford to hire tutors for all major school subjects, hire an essay writer, etc. and students would work hard to get into a prestigious collage, it will be more than likely that they will be in the lower third of their class in college if they do not have any other interest than getting a prestigious college diploma.

Students who working with prize-winning science projects might be accepted even they have As and Bs.

Only high-school projects count for colleges, but there are only 3 years to participate in competitions (freshman, sophomore, and junior years). The results from senior year will come too late, after student is already accepted or rejected by the college of his choice.

Like in any sports, one cannot expect to win if he competes for the first time in his junior year. To be a winner, one should start years earlier, in the first years at elementary school to learn the process of preparing projects, comparing his projects with other at competitions, year after year, watching prize-winning projects, and analyzing why they won the top prizes. It is also important to know the people who run the competitions and to be known by them. The later is of great importance. Life is life, and the best project is not always the one that wins. Successful participation in science competitions in earlier years significantly helps to win in later years in high school.

Students who participate in science competitions and are accepted by colleges often start their research from their first days at college. Usually their experience from the school years is very helpful. In many cases, prize-winning projects prepared by high school students are conducted in colleges, and in many cases under the supervision of professors. Many high school chemistry, biology, physics, or science teachers have Ph.D. degrees and supervise projects that win prizes at the international level.

Even when school science projects are conducted in university labs, they are simply learning projects. To find a mentor and organization that would allow using their lab equipment is a challenge. Very rarely do mentors really teach students and lead them through the scientific project at the high school level. If one is lucky to find a mentor like this, only a few other students from hundreds share his luck.

A very important question is who did what, i.e. what was done by the student and what was done by his parents and mentors. This is a terra incognito. As one school official said, "We assume that everything was done by students." It is in spite of the contents of many acknowledgments that state that their parents helped with projects (fathers helped prepare prototypes, mothers helped write the science papers and prepare displays, and their teachers encouraged them through challenges of the projects). In reality, science projects in physics and engineering at least are very primitive and below the real capabilities of students.

A Science Club was proposed as an alternative. The idea is to have a place where any student of any grade will be able to build a prototype and run all the necessary tests using modern equipment and receive advice from experienced mentors. If the desired project is too large, a team of a few students might be formed or it can be a multi-year project. Pawnee Science Club was founded specifically for this purpose.

Science project "How a simple coil of metal wire can save an airplane" by 5th grader Amanda Shapiro prepared through Pawnee Science Club and presented at the Shawnee Mission R&D Forum is a good example. While it is a cutting-edge project that was solicitated by the Department of Defense, while the theory of operation of this device, a nondestructive test apparatus, is beyond not only 5th grade curriculum, but even college physics class, experimental part is extremely simple: it is just a coil of the magnet wire on the ferromagnetic core! Exactly like any household spool of fabric or nylon thread! Just much smaller.

Through a small capacitor, high frequency (f = 500 kHz) alternating current of a few volts is applied to the mentioned coil that is an eddy current sensor. A tiny changes of the voltage across the coil will reflect presence of cracks on the surface of metal objects located near coil with a gap of 1/32 to 1/2 of an inch.

More information about this topic will be presented in a future issue.