How I Won at the UK's Biggest Science Fair
"So your entered in the engineer category," she said kindly,
"Am I?" I responed, "I thought I was in the scientist category..."
It was not off to a good start, fortunately it got a bit better from there...
It was a few months ago that I had returned from America, Oklahoma specifically. Where over the last few months I had been recording earthquakes with the seismometer that my next door neighbour had allowed me to borrow. It wasn't a bad time to measure earthquakes over there, what with Donald Trump being elected and all.
Whilst I managed to record several physical earthquakes I also managed to miss two magnitude 5 earthquakes, one week before and one week after I left OKC (Oklahoma City). Unlucky as that might have been I had still managed to record a large number of earthquakes.
When I returned back to the UK my neighbour encouraged me to enter this regional science fair called the big bang, I had no idea how far it would take me.
I entered, without much effort, and kind of forgot about the entry that I had submitted online. A few weeks later I got a letter telling me I had got through to the national finals. Huh. That was a surprise. Apparently in a few months time we would be heading to the NEC in Birmingham- one of the UK's biggest conference centres to run a stand and talk to some of the over 70,000 visitors that come to see the projects and companies.
Surprised, I did some research. Apparently out of thousands of school teams that enter only about 200 get through to the finals, nearly all of them school teams, what I didn't know at this point was that this year I was the only non-school based "team" to get through to the finals.
The local judges enclosed some advice recommending I alter my project to include a hypothesis and make it more scientific, instead of just documenting.
My neighbour, who is one of the leading seismologists in the UK and has been on programs like BBC breakfast, continued to help me. Together with him and some help from my parents we prepared our stand.
A few months later we were at the NEC the evening before the fair began. It was slightly nerve racking, everyone else there with the large school teams and teachers. Then there was just me and my parents. Walking into this massive hall that was soon to be packed.
this is just one part of the centre, in total imagine this x5 and you get an idea of how big this was. 70,000 visitors, celebrity judges, the BBC cameras and all these huge companies...
It was the night before and we were trying to set up our last minute addition. A "Who can make the largest earthquake competition," with a massive chocolate prize - all run on our own homemade LEGO seismometer.
At this point the thing my project was examining was whether cheep seismometers were accurate compared to expensive professional stations like the one in OKC. In the end our conclusion was they were, so how cheep can we get this? Well, using a metal coil, some software called Jameseis and a ruler and magnet we were taking this to new levels.
In the bottom left corner you can see the seismometer in the window of our hotel in America
The problem was, with just one night until the fair started, this killer setup... wasn't working. Instead of recording the size of earthquake, that the seismometer was recording, the software was instead recording how loud the persons jump was. Not ideal. It was coming to closing time, soon we would simply have a competition of who could be the loudest, not sure how much that would impress the judges.
I dove deep into the settings of this software that was new to me and my parents, with just a few minutes left we weren't getting anywhere. Two minutes before we had to pack up and leave I found the switch, we were back in business.
I had three interviews at set times through out the two weekdays through which the competition ran. That meant that the rest of my time could be spent doing, whatever I wanted, I had a free pass and no teacher, I could do whatever I wanted... to an extent.
Still with my competition to run I couldn't be completely absent from my stand, but my parents were quite happy sitting there and running the competition so for hours on end I attempted to entertain myself. Considering I was basically stuck inside the same room for two days straight I wasn't sure how easy this was going to be.
Here's some stuff I managed to get up to: Seeing the robot wars winning robots; talking to a magician; flying a drone; going in VR; going to watch some of the live shows.
I got asked for my snapchat and Instagram a few times which was quite funny and met a pair of kids who were sure I was famous. The best bits for me though were talking to other school teams about there projects- I went around and attempted to look at all of them, to me this was far more interesting than seeing some stands from companies. My stand was very busy, constantly, because of the earthquake competition and the chocolate prize but lots of other groups, just showing their project, barely had anyone visit their stands. Apart form the BBC crew.
I spoke to one guy who had made a modular mobile phone, from scratch, with interchangeable parts. Thinking that it was actually quite interesting I asked him how many people had talked to him about it before I left- apparently I was the only one.
After not expecting to get to this round, AT ALL. I was sure as hell not expecting to actually win anything. Especially now I had seen some of the other projects, one team had literally made a vest for epileptic people that told them they were going to have a fit before it happened, improving the time they are able to get help beforehand by something like ten minutes.
On the first day, we were told only people shortlisted for prizes would get interviews on the second day. Well, after the first interview, where I had forgotten what category I was in, I was not expecting to win anything.
But the second day came around and early on I was informed I had an interview on camera with the Rotaory club then another one later. I did both - trying to stay relaxed. I guess the second interviewer might have been a celebrity but I had no clue who they were, which was probably a good thing.
It was nearly time for the prize giving. All the visitors were leaving. Before I went along my parents and I went to see the 1851 trust, the people who were sponsoring my friend Annabelle and I to go to Bermuda and compete in the Americas cup "endeavour series", chatted to them about sailing for a bit and then we went to the prize giving.
some pictures of the Americas Cup that I never did end up going to
As we packed up our stand I chatted to some random school kids watching a robot competition, we spoke for a while and wouldn't you have guessed, they asked me whether I was famous and what my Instagram was.