[amazon_link id=”1401323790″ target=”_blank” ]
[/amazon_link]
[amazon_link id=”1401323790″ target=”_blank” ]Science Fair Season[/amazon_link] by Judy Dutton, Hyperion (April 19, 2011)
review by Ernest Lilley
If you’re interested in thrilling tales of science, here’s a dozen you shouldn’t miss. No aliens or inter-dimensional gateways, though neither would be out of place, just a bunch of truly remarkable teens doing amazing science and reaching for the brass ring in the heated competition of a science fair.
Author/reporter Judy Dutton got sucked into the vortex of science fairs when she ran across a story about a boy training drug sniffing cockroaches and decided to follow up on it. The result is a wonderful series of short stories about the remarkable and very real adventures of a dozen kids, each with a spark of invention and the drive to follow it where it leads them.
The drama in these stories makes for gripping reading. Not just because you want to know who’s going to take home the big prize (the stories are all about contestants from one the 2009 Intel International Science & Engineering Fair), but because the back-stories of these kids is as compelling as anything you’ll read in science fiction. Since it’s reality, the author doesn’t have to keep coincidence or implausibility to believable levels…she can go with the remarkable truths these teens represent.
If you’re a tech-type, there’s a fair chance you’ve entered a science fair of your own, or at the very least thought about it. You’ll find yourself in here somewhere, or the you that might have been in an alternate reality, and it’s more than an idle exercise to wonder what forces shaped these kids, and how those forces could be used to help others realize their potential. There’s no doubt that the contestants in this book are all brilliant, but that’s not all it took to get them to the science fair. As the author points out, the difference between being awarded a prize for a home-made nuclear reactor (yes, really) or having the government swoop down on your block in hazmat suits to shut down your backyard lab is often a matter of the people around you, and whether they’re willing to support your desire to explore or shut you down.
Myself, I only made it to one science fair, and there was no way my marine biology exhibit, complete with home-made plankton net and continuous looping tape recorded lecture (the judges were more interested in how I tricked the tape recorder into running a 3 minute loop than my net) was going to win anything. But it was a great experience, and this book brings it back. It also brings back the memories of the teachers that encouraged me, of my mom helping me make a solar furnace out of a beach umbrella and aluminum foil, and my neighbor Mike, an engineer who always had time for my questions.
Science Fair contestants, like all scientific explorers, may be giants in their own right, but it’s the shoulders they stand on that make all the difference.
Links:
- TechRevu: March 2, 2011: Jimmy Neutron Has Nothing On The Teens In Science Fair Season
- Intel International Science and Engineering Fair
Product Description
This is the engaging true story of kids competing in the high-stakes, high-drama world of international science fairs. Every year the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair brings together 1,500 high schoolers from more than 50 countries to compete for over $4 million dollars in prizes and scholarships. These amazing kids are doing everything from creating bionic prosthetics to conducting groundbreaking stem cell research, from training drug-sniffing cockroaches to building a nuclear reactor. In Science Fair Season, Judy Dutton follows twelve teens looking for science fair greatness and tells the gripping stories of their road to the big competition. Some will win, some will lose, but all of their lives are changed forever.
The Intel International Science & Engineering Fair is the most prominent science fair in the country, and it takes a special blend of drive, heart, and smarts to win there. Dutton goes inside the inner sanctum of science fair competitions and reveals the awe-inspiring projects and the competitors there. Each of the kids–ranging from a young Erin Brokovich who made the FBI watch list for taking on a big corporation, to a quietly driven boy who lives in a run-down trailer on a Navajo reservation, to a wealthy Connecticut girl who dreams of being an actress and finds her calling studying bees, to a troubled teenager in a juvenile detention facility, to the next Bill Gates–take readers on an unforgettable journey.
Along the way, Science Fair Season gives readers a glimpse of the future bright minds of America and shows how our country is still a place for inventors and dreamers, and that the “geeks” will truly inherit the earth.
About the Author
Judy Dutton is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Since graduating from Harvard with a degree in English and American Literature, she’s contributed to Cosmopolitan, Maxim, Glamour, Redbook, and other magazines and websites. She is also the author of Secrets from the Sex Lab, an eye-opening look at the most groundbreaking scientific discoveries in the realm of sexual behavior.