Students produced outstanding Science Fair and Group 4 projects during the school-wide competition on Friday, Feb. 19. 29 students scored high enough to progress onto the Regional Science Fair competition “which is a bit higher than average,” said Science Fair coordinator Steve Fenchel.

During the competition, students set up their display boards in the cafeteria and waited questioning from three separate judges about the nature and procedure of their science experiment. Due to the rescheduling of the event on account of snow, a large portion of the judges were not able to attend, resulting in a lengthy judging period.

“Because of the snow, we only had about a third of the judges,” said Fenchel. “The judging was a little more rushed: Less time, more projects,” he said. Despite the impaired judging situation, AHS did relatively well.

“There’s a maximum of 20 projects from each school, including TJ [Thomas Jefferson High School],” said Fenchel. AHS filled 19 out of the possible 20 projects. This success is largely attributable to the genuine interest by students on their projects. “The judges commented that what really stood out was the enthusiasm of the students,” said Fenchel.

These 29 students will participate at the Regional Science Fair on Sunday, March 14 at Robinson Secondary School. There, students from AHS will encounter hundreds of other students from schools across Northern Virginia. “Numbers wise there’s about 890 students and 250 projects,” said Fenchel.

In preparation, the Regional qualifiers are polishing up their experiment spiel to impress the Regional judges.

It’s pretty much the same thing [but] we’ll probably go over our presentation more,” said Regional Science Fair qualifier, senior Gwen Kennedy.

“One of the judging criteria is the presentation, so if they [students] have a really good presentation they can win even if it’s not the best project,” said Fenchel. Fortunately for students, after polishing up their presentations, the Regional competition does not add significantly more work.

“We just need to copy and paste things for our lab report to give to the Regional Science Fair people [judges],” said Regional qualifier, senior Mariam Oweis.

Further benefiting Regional qualifiers, it is conceivable that the Regional Competition could literally pay off the student’s efforts because of potential scholarships.

“Last year the PTA [Parent Teacher Association] donated $500, so there are some scholarships,” said Fenchel. “There were two $1,500 scholarships last year,” he said.

Additionally, students that perform well at the Regional Science Fair qualify for a trip to the State Science Fair in Richmond, Virginia, to be paid for by Fairfax County.

Success at the Regional Science Fair is hazy. Students have unique and well-researched experiments, but the rules of the competition are not in their favor. The judges at the Regional Science Fair are only allowed to send a capped number of students on to states, but want to send as many projects as possible. Resultantly, projects designed by a single student, rather than a group, tend to do better.

“We had a lot of group projects this year,” said Fenchel. “The single projects tend to do better,” he said somewhat despairingly. But the results of Regional competition remain up in the air; results are to be released the week after the competition between Sunday, March 21 and Saturday, March 27.