Science Fair Season

Spring means science fair around ACS!  After our mostly failed ant experiment last year that was kind of salvaged into something presentable, we were determined to have a simpler one this year but still not revert to the canned science fair project idea websites.  Luckily we have Jake as a great out-of-the-box thinker.  Initially, I came up with a few lame ideas and the girls just looked at us blankly when we tried to get them to come up with ideas.  As the clock was ticking and we needed an idea, Jake did a great job of getting all of our creative juices flowing and coming up with more and better ideas.  The kids have learned a lot about healthy eating this year and we spent a lot of time thinking through some kind of behavioral experiment where they could measure how much of the healthy food (fruits and veggies) the kids at school ate in the cafeteria and then market healthy eating a bit to further raise awareness and see if it made a difference.  It started to get very complex so we kept going.

Jake continue to rattle off lots of things that got us all inspired and bursting with ideas but the real success came when he started telling the girls about a book we had both recently read called "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.  This book has tons of great insights about how we think and how our brain works that weren't always super intuitive.

In any case, he was explaining one premise to the girls and they started getting excited about it (because they actually understood it which I can't say was true about all the ideas!).  The concept was around anchoring and how just seeing a random number can influence you when you try to guess or estimate something.

So the girls came up with trying to estimate how many jelly beans were in a jar.  It was fun letting them walk through what they would need to do to see if anchoring worked on their fellow students but it was a fun process.  Jake had to reign me in a bit as I have the tendency to want to jump in myself vs. letting the girls figure things out on their own but I think we found a good balance and I love how this project involved all three big girls (Meredith to a much more limited degree) and they learned so much through the process.

They filled a big jar with jelly beans (carefully counted mainly by our expert kindergarten counter with help from Jane).  Regan and Jane made three different posters and arranged with all the second and fourth grade teachers to let them come into their classrooms.  They took a different poster into each different classroom and asked the kids to read the instructions on the poster and estimate how many jelly beans were in the jar.  One class had a plain poster that just had the instructions and a bunch of question marks all over it.  One poster (the "low anchor" one) had the same information on the poster but in addition to the question marks, there were word bubbles with low numbers in them (350?  500?  600?).  The "high anchor" poster had 2,500?  2000? and 1800? in the word bubbles).  They didn't mention the numbers at all when they visited the classrooms.

Jane is not a big fan of getting in front of people so this was a great exercise for her to coordinate with the other teachers and talk to all the second grade classrooms.  I think this part was easier for Regan but she was still nervous.  The other fourth grade teachers were great though and made her feel very welcome.

They polished up on their spreadsheet skills a bit and put all the guesses into a spreadsheet.  I was a bit nervous as they were calculating the class averages (I wasn't sure *how* we would salvage this project if it didn't work!) but we were all so very excited to see that it worked!  The kids exposed to the "high anchor' posters were more likely to guess larger numbers and the results were roughly the same for the second and fourth grade classes.

They had so much fun at the actual science fair.  I think it was a bit difficult to quickly explain to the kids what they did and what it meant in the 20 or so seconds Regan and Jane had their attention (they were really just interested in how many jelly beans there were and who guessed the closest!).  But the adults gave these girls so much encouragement and props.  They listened so well and Jane really gained some confidence in having so many grown-ups enthused about what she was telling them.  The main highlight was that a middle school teacher loved their project so much that she invited the girls to come present it to her class.

We also emailed the author of the book that inspired the project as we thought he would get a kick out it.  Unfortunately a few weeks later, we haven't heard back but we haven't given up that he'll eventually reply.

What a fun project!  It makes *me* want to go back to elementary school so I can work on them again. Oh, wait, I don't need to - I can just help these girls with one next year, too!  Great job, girls!

Counting jelly beans for the jar

The actual science fair.

The different posters they took to different classrooms.  Note the
different numbers in the world bubbles on two of them.