Paging Young Einsteins: Google Launches Science Fair
Get your experiments ready kids, this is not your mother's science fair. We're calling it the "American Idol" for science geeks, but Google is billing it as the "first global online science competition." Either way, the Google Science Fair is open for competition, with only an Internet connection and a good idea needed to enter. Forget Einstein, throw away the project display board, here's how you can be the next Larry or Sergey.
Get your experiments ready kids, this is not your mother’s science fair. We’re calling it the “American Idol” for science geeks, but Google is billing it as the “first global online science competition.” Either way, the Google Science Fair is open for competition, with only an Internet connection and a good idea needed to enter. Forget Einstein, throw away your project display board, here’s how you can be the next Larry or Sergey.
“How many ideas are lost because people don’t have the right forum for their talents to be discovered?” Google asks in a blog post about the new competition. “We believe that science can change the world – and one way to encourage that is to celebrate and champion young scientific talent as we athletes and pop idols.”
The Google Global Science Fair 2011 is open to students aged 13-18 years old, working solo or in groups of up to three. Applicants must come up with their own hypothesis, create an experiment to test it, and present the results and conclusion in either a two-minute video or a 20-slide presentation.
Registration is open through April 4. Semifinalists will be announced in May and will be invited to present their projects at Google headquarters on July 11.
And remember the days when top prize at the science fair meant a blue ribbon, pat on the back or, just maybe, entrance to the state competition? Not in this race.
Through partnerships with the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LEGO Group, National Geographic and Scientific American, Google is awarding 12 prizes, from the grand prize of a 10-day trip to the Galapagos with National Geographic Explorer to a Google scholarship worth $50,000. Select winners will also get real-life work experiences with the sponsors, including a five-day stint at CERN in Europe.
Google’s pitch to aspiring online science junkies begins with a feel-good story about how Google co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page got their start with a simple science experiment as well. And we all know how that ended.
“They did their research, tested their theories and built a search engine which (eventually) changed the way people found information online,” the blog entry reads.
All the details on entry rules, judging criteria, and prizes, are on the Google Science Fair website.
