My sixth-grade sister decided one spring to use the army of snails devouring our mother’s garden to march toward scholastic glory.
She wanted to enter the science fair, and thought that a project on whether snails have homing instincts would be a winner.
Using her extensive nail polish collection, she marked about a dozen snail shells with different colors depending on the locations where their occupants had been found. After several days, she checked back to see whether the snails had returned to the same spots.
I read recently that garden snails do have homing abilities. But our gastropods apparently never got that memo. Despite being among the slowest land animals, they were remarkably mobile. None of them ever returned to the bushes where they had been found.
My sister recruited me and our mother in her search for missing slugs. Several must have either been devoured by predators attracted to their brightly-colored shells or taken off for distant gardens. Despite a thorough search of our yard, we were never able to locate them.
The project ended several weeks later in relief for our entire family, along with an honorable mention for my sister in the county science fair.
But that wasn’t the end of our snail saga.
My sister kept the tri-fold board she decorated with shells until she went to college. More than three decades later, we still look back and laugh about her snail science experiment. Although neither of us can recall much from our elementary school science classes, we appreciate the spirit of inquiry that her project nurtured.
This spring, science fairs are in the air in Highland Park ISD schools. Although the projects have changed, students’ genuine curiosity about how the world works hasn’t.
Young scientists at Bradfield Elementary asked some of the questions about artificial intelligence at their annual science fair that have left adults scratching their heads.
One project challenged subjects to distinguish between actual photos and those that had been generated by AI. The conclusion: People can tell the difference most, but not all, of the time. An image of a class of students painting fooled seven of 14 test subjects.
Another young scientist asked Dad and a computer to play the guessing game 20 Questions about objects in their house. Dad won. The computer was at a disadvantage because it didn’t know the child or what was in the house, explained retired Bradfield science teacher Priscilla Crow.
Crow was judging the science fair for the fourth year, but this was her first time evaluating projects on AI. “Every year it’s fun just to see what the new thing is,” she remarked, adding that she loves the classics as well.
The projects at Highland Park High School’s SciTech Festival Student Fair were, of course, more sophisticated than those at Bradfield. But most were still inspired by students’ personal experiences.
And rather than focusing on competition, these budding scientists supported each other through the STAR — short for Science, Technology, and Research — Club, which was founded last year by high schoolers Ellie Chong and James Hu.
As the world changes, science fairs will doubtless continue to evolve. But so long as they keep giving young innovators an opportunity to put their curiosity to the test, have fun, and work to find solutions to tricky problems, they’ll be heading in the right direction.