Saturday, May 12th, I joined over three hundred other men and women to judge the presentations of over one thousand teenage boys and girls as they worked out hypotheses, wrote about their discoveries, shared their conclusions and reported the results of the projects they had claimed as theirs for the past several weeks and months.

The place where all this happened was the French Field House in Columbus, Ohio. A more important or popular sounding reference would be to say this was next to St. John Arena where great basketball games draw Ohio State University fans and visiting enthusiasts to watch men and women a few years older try to make their marks as well. The place I call home, Lancaster, Ohio, is just about thirty miles from this arena for sports and not being even an itsy bitsy fan of sports, about the only thing I know or remember are the unfortunate marks some OSU sports personalities have left on both their personal characters and the reputation of the college of their choice. I will leave it to the dogged routine of the news media to call our attention to misspent youth and misplaced values among a very small percentage of such athletes. Seems that is what maximizes our minds – the failures of a few youth who made some poor choices.

As I sat exploding the facts of my great day to my wife, Jean, she thought I better put such words to work and say something GOOD about youth for a change. I don’t recall “chewing out youth” per se recently or even during the time I have written essays for this website but I will admit some comments have shown less than a good opinion of some of the youth today.

My relatively new “career” as a judge started a few months ago when I was asked to judge a school district Science Fair in Baltimore, Ohio. Since I had never done that before I felt rather unprepared and inadequate but I accepted the challenge. Then came along another Science Fair level of participants who were to be judged at Ohio University – Lancaster Branch. I got involved with that too. I was, you could say, becoming hooked as a judge but I still had some doubts as to my qualifications. Just a few weeks after this second science fair I was contacted asking if I would serve as a judge at the state level of the Science Fair projects. This was the epitome of my experience with the Science Fair program in my brief tenures as a judge. According to the printed program of the 50th Annual State Science Day it became obvious why all this was new to me – I graduated from high school one year after this kind of program began here in this part of Ohio.

Our children were not in the college-bound or heavy-into-scholarship achievements so all during their school days science fairs were never a part of our school participation. I am grateful someone asked me to be a judge for that school science fair a few months ago. I discovered the kids of our society are learning something. I discovered kids of our society are doing some real thought-provoking projects. Regretfully, I have joined other adults in comparing the youth of today to the perfect examples we thought our generation was at that age (even though there were no science fairs when we was in school).

I want to, no, need to go on record as commending, congratulating and giving all the kudos I can muster to more than a thousand teenagers for being involved in the Science Fair program. Participants for the Science Fair were from grades seven through twelve, and of course both boys and girls were involved. Fortunately, also, any child with any level of handicaps (or, “challenged” as some say today) was given an opportunity to take on such projects. I will have to say all of these kids were not Einsteins, but I also must say, “Neither was the boy Einstein, the ‘Einstein’ he became!” These young people worked on projects, involved others as participants in their projects, kept accurate records, made charts, notes, worked up hypotheses (I doubt I even knew the word existed when I was their age) and prepared presentations to give before judges like myself, and the more than 300 judges I worked with in Columbus, Ohio. I was impressed! These kids were sharp. Most boys were dressed in gentlemanly attire and most girls were “dressed like girls” (excuse the generational-gap-critical-comments where people my age see unisex attire, and aside from certain areas of body shapes, it is hard to tell the boys from the girls sometimes).

After my period of judging I took the time to visit those thousand spaces but admittedly my visits and observations were cursory. One boy had worked on catapults and since I had made several models of toy catapults that caught my eye and we had a great few minutes sharing our successes. One young lady had worked on a project involving the color “orange” and I could not resist chiding her for picking out the color used for her poster – orange (what else?). Some posters, even though all were nearly identical in kind, size and design, individual talents came through and some naturally caught my eye quicker than others. The quality of being neat was nearly uniform and I cannot remember one that was poorly done. Sometimes teams (of two) worked on a project and the team my judge-partner and I interviewed did a quick job of “picking up” where one team member left off — well queued or practiced I could not tell, but they spoke as one voice.

Those teenagers worked on projects as daring as: “If you only had a brain”, “How catnip affects cats”, “Deflection: Don’t get bent out of shape”, “Is 13% more accuracy worth 140% more money?”, “Right cerebral hemisphere: Which gender among teens is stronger?”. One boy, Joshua, a 12th grader, is working part-time with a Lancaster orthodontist, had some professional mentoring by his employer, had a very involved project, “Which dental bond brand has the most tensile strength?” This young boy recognized me first and it wasn’t long until we figured out I had been a judge on his project at the Ohio University location. With limited space in my essay it is impossible to fairly represent the other projects but I honestly don’t recall seeing many duplicates and that in itself it a real scientific achievement.

Personally I feel like the winner in this science fair – I learned we have a very substantial group of young men and women who can think and express themselves. I actually included such words in the comments section of my judge’s card. If I live long enough I will not be surprised to see a surprising number of those participants on lists of patent owners, authors, chemists, dentists, opticians, essayists, naturalists, professional farmers and “professionals” of a couple dozen other fields. My hat goes off to all of those teenagers. Naturally there were incentives, and as the printed program reported: “Sometimes in the excitement of the sponsored awards and ratings we lose track of the fact that everyone at State Science Day is an achiever.” Amen to that. Practically speaking, only a few hundred projects could be collectively granted $1.7 million in sponsored awards and scholarships. Hats off to the many sponsors including names we see around us everyday – electric power companies, chemical corporations (one of which was founded in 1885 and has 143 affiliates in 47 countries). You see, this was not a small stuff project – it was a big deal to deserving youth and proudly supported by observant sponsors in both the private sector as well as corporate giants.

“GREAT JOB!” is my comment for all the participants at the 59th Annual (Ohio) State Science Day held Saturday, May 12, 2007, in Columbus, Ohio.

The Wordwright