Congratulations to the 2nd annual Adult Science Fair participants!

Results

Some important dates:

• Registration deadline is October 5th. Don’t worry if you don’t know what you want to do yet. We’ll work with you to figure out a great experiment over the next two weeks.

• Proposal accepted by October 15th. Start your sciencing!

• November 12-The day of the Event at ILLUMINATE

Guideline and Hardlines

We are excited for the projects you all come up with! We want the projects and event to be as fun, safe, and successful as possible. So we compiled a handbook of sorts. First, we have to talk about the rules. So here are the Guidelines and the Hardlines:

1. All projects must be pre-approved by STEAMpunk Academy. Each team will submit a proposal to us and a group of research experts will look at the project just like how a formal ethical review board would. We reserve the right to refuse or cancel any project as we wish at any time. Your mentors will help you keep it on the up-and-up throughout. 

No animals (including humans) can be harmed or put at risk of harm in your project outside what might be expected in one’s typical life. Some of these could be mitigated using Informed Consent procedures we can help you create. But we have to err on the side of caution. It is contextual though. For example, we would allow you to conduct an experiment on the best fly fishing lures but would not allow you to intentionally electrocute fish. We also take no responsibility for anything that happens in your project. We are just trying to keep you from going full Rick and Morty on us. Here are the ethical categories we are looking at: 

• Legal: You can not at any point in the project break any Utah/federal/municipal/international laws. For example, if you want to do something that includes using THC, that’s going to get us in trouble. Sorry, not yet.

• Physical harms include but are not limited to any tissue damage or risk of illness. No animal (that includes humans) can never be put in potential for harm outside what they would normally encounter in their typical lives.

• Environmental harms include but are not limited to using dangerous chemicals, or risks to populations of living things. And no molesting endangered or threatened species (that’s really the word they use in the laws- molesting)

• Social harms include but are not limited to loss of privacy (such as using identifiable info of people), risk of embarrassment, job loss, or legal issues. 

• Psychological harms include but are not limited to any potential adverse emotional or cognitive effects to participants or researchers.

With that, there must be no coercion and participants must have whatever necessary Informed Consent as to what they are participating in. For example, you can not just give your roommates White Claw without their knowledge because that shit is gross.

2. We are requiring early approval not just for ethics but because we also want mentors available to your team if you wish. We have STEM and social scientists, artists, educators, engineers, and designers that are here to help you along the way, from initial idea to final poster.

3. By participating, you are letting us use photos of you and your project and content for marketing purposes, unless you specifically ask us not to do so. We respect you don’t want your boss to know you drink White Claw. 

4. There is a $20 registration fee per team. This helps offset costs to put this on and it makes you more likely to follow through (that’s according to science!) We do not want money to be a barrier though, so talk to us if times are tight. We won’t turn anyone away.

5. Your team can be of any size. The final competition at Kiitos is 21 and older only. You can have people under 21 help you, as long as it doesn’t break laws and you don’t just have your kids do all the work.

6. Projects will be judged. There will be prizes. Guidelines and metrics will be released in the near future. But for starters, the final project must be on a Tri-Fold or a diorama like back in school and it should be engaging and accessible to the general public.

7. All your hard work will culminate in a science fair poster session in early September where we all get to imbibe and share our amazing projects!  Judging will happen then. Because we trust the wisdom of  the great ones, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, we are taking the threat of COVID-19 seriously. The final event  will happen in whatever way needed to ensure the safety of ourselves and our community. 

8. No Sandbagging. Sandbagging is a term from competitive sports where someone competes below their actual level in order to score higher. This event is for light-hearted scientific inquiry in the general community, and for drinking. Not for doing rigorous research to publish in peer reviewed journals. 

If you are one of those expert types, we are still looking for experts to be mentors and judges. You are welcome to participate but try testing out which type of liquor helps you chill the fuck out and take a break from your graduate studies for once. 

9. No Deadpooling. We all remember the time Brewvies got busted for serving beer while showing Ryan Reynolds’ dingaling to undercover officers. We welcome topics that involve things like sex (hoping for it), but please refrain from being too obscene or the Utah busy-bodies will be jumping down our throats, like really deep. So deep.  

We also want to be mindful of triggering content and create an event that is a safe space. But aspects of our world are not always that. So be aware sensitive topics like sex and alcohol may be in present in projects.

10. We are not Melania! Plagiarism, academic dishonesty, and making up data will not be tolerated. #BeBest.

How to Create a Totally Rad Science Project.

Aside from the Guidelines and Hardlines, we are leaving the idea making to you. We have STEM and social scientists, artists, educators, engineers, and designers that are here to help you along the way, from initial idea to final poster. Here are some examples and suggestions to help you along the way. A lot of this may look overwhelming now, but we aren't here to win Nobel Prizes. We are here to do fun and somewhat haphazard projects.

Step One: Get your friends on board and register. Don’t have an idea yet? No problem! You will have a couple weeks to come up with a project after you register. Teams can be any size, but only 21 and older can be at the final event.Register here:

Step Two: Create an initial idea. If you don’t know where to start, we can hook you up with mentors. The idea will likely fall into two categories: an engineering project or a science project. So for example, that’s either inventing a new vibrator, or testing which vibrator you already own is most effective, respectively. 

Step Three: Solidify your idea. If it’s an engineering project, then create your invention proposal. If it’s a science project, then create a testable hypothesis. We will also be putting on live and online events to talk about the details of the scientific method. These will be led by professional educators.  This is the first point that you need to do your research. See our guide below on how to get research.

Step Four: Submit your idea to STEAMpunk Academy. This is where we look it over to; make sure it’s following the Guidelines and Hardlines, make suggestions about how to make the project successful, and connect you with mentors if you wish. 

Step Five: Once you get final approval, you will have up to a couple months to get ‘er done. Don’t procrastinate! We will continue to do check-in events for everyone and your mentors will keep working with you as much as you want. So run your study, build your prototype. 

Step Six: Analyze your results. I’m going to let you in on a little secret right here- most experiments fail. There is even a whole podcast about this side of science called Story Collider.  Shit goes wrong, stuff comes up, and even if you finish you very well might not get the results you hoped for. All of that is A-OK. The final judging is not based on if you got the hoped-for result, but if you had a cool idea and saw it to the end. 

Step Seven: Write-up your results. Create the Tri-Fold or diorama and explain to the world your genius. As this point approaches, we will continue to post info on how to do that successfully. And we will supply you with the rubrics the judges will be using.

Final step. Eureka! You just did the Science!! Now come on down to the Science Fair in September and compete for all the glory!

Free and cheap resources for your projects.

Even with million dollar fMRIs pushing psychological science forward these days, some of the most important experiments in that field took nothing but a mirror and a clever scientist to spring human knowledge forward leaps and bounds, like in the Mirror Self Awareness task or Ramachandran’s Mirror Box for Phantom Limb. There are a ton of free and cheap tools out there for you to use in your projects. Below are some tools with wide applications that we know about. If you know of others, please let us know so we can share. Some of these might feel intense and be beyond what you need, but we wanted to share them with you all. Our mentors can help you find tools and databases for your more specific topics.

Physical Materials and Resources

1. Clever Octopus. Arts and Crafts upcycling store

2. Habitat for Humanity ReStore. Building and construction materials thrift store

3. SLC Bicycle Collective. Recycled bicycle parts

4. Make Salt Lake. Maker Space for DIY building engineering

5. SLCC Community Writing Center. Free writing coaching and writing workshops

6. SLC Library. Free books and other resources. 

Internet and Database analysis

1. Google Analytics. Track online trends 

2. Omeka . Provides open-source web publishing platforms for sharing digital collections

3. ArcGIS. More technical but can be used to analyze large geographic and demographic data

4. US Census Data. Massive database of searchable demographic data. 

5. Gapminder. Health data visualization tool. 

6. Statista. Basic economic, demographic data for free. More advanced access for pay

Surveying People.

1. Survey Monkey (free, but pay for added features)

2. Google forms (free, with limits)

Audio/Video recording

1. Probably your phone

2. Audacity (free)  Basic analysis/editing of audio data.

3. Raven (not free but relatively cheap) More complex analysis for audio data. From Cornell and designed to analyze and edit bird calls with cool stuff like spectrograms.

4. iNaturalist. Phone App to record, document living things. Your data also becomes part of a massive open science database. 

For basic spreadsheets and basic data analysis

1. OpenOffice. Knockoff of Microsoft Office (free)

2. Google Suite (free, except you pay with your data)

More intense statistical analysis

1. JASP free user friendly statistical software

2. PSPP free less user friendly knockoff of the popular SPSS

3. R (abandon all hope ye who enter here) This is for advanced analysis and visualization for people with intermediate to advanced coding knowledge.

Engineering

1. Arduino. Open-source electronic prototyping platform enabling users to create interactive electronic objects.

2. Blender. Open source 3D design and drafting platform

How to get background research for your project.

"If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." -Isaac Newton

To have a successful science project, you have to do some background research to find out what needs to be done and what is possible. We are not requiring this step, but judges will be looking for evidence that your idea was informed by previous science. Peer-reviewed research is one of the cornerstones of good science. Essentially, if you want to publish research you did, it has to get past a group of your expert peers. Without it, you get your crazy racist uncle sharing weird blogs about 5G on Facebook. There are some issues with this process but the biggest is that society typically has to pay to get access to published peer-reviewed research which is totally messed up. Most of it is locked behind massive paywalls in a most absurd system. Scientists do research, mostly for low pay through taxpayer money, submit it to peer-reviewed journals without getting paid anything more, and then most of these private journals lock those research papers away and require exorbitant fees for researchers and taxpayers to get access to what they paid for and created. We get that it costs money to maintain websites and pay copy editors but they have exorbitant profit margins for very little work. All with free labor from scientists and bankrolled by the taxpayer. This Vox article explains more about how totally whack it all is. But you can get to some of it. Here are some ways, from most legal and legit to least.

1. If you happen to already be associated with a college or research institution, they are already paying these huge fees. So do research through those databases. The U of U also allows daily guest access but you have to go up to the Markosian Library.

2. Public libraries also have access to many of the same ones universities and colleges do. Ask your friendly local librarian how to get access to them.

3. Google Scholar  will search for peer review only articles. If you have immediate free access to an article there will be a link on the side of the search hit. These free ones come from random webpages or Open Access journals which are free to all. Journals with paywalls will typically ask you for $35 a pop. We really don’t want you to spend that kind of cash on this. If it’s burning a hole in your pocket, instead send that money to Utah Black Lives Matter or Salt Lake Mutual Aid. Or us. 

4. Ask the authors or a scientist friend directly. It is perfectly legal for people to hand off individual copies for educational and scholarly purposes. We are that.

5. A lot of peer-reviewed research is dense, super technical, and not written well. So there is plenty of good science journalism, books, and documentaries that talk about the research you want in a way you want to learn about it. Just be mindful that it doesn’t always get it right. We highly recommend this episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight about that (it’s explicit.) 

6. Pre-print databases. A new movement has come to put research projects that have not been published out for others to see. This is a cool movement for two reasons. One, since not all research gets published, we can get a bigger understanding of the research as a whole. And two; peer review takes a while. So in cases like the COVID pandemic, you can get important information out quickly. The downside is they have not been vetted yet so many of the early COVID papers were pre-prints that researchers had to walk back on. The largest examples of these databases is arXiv and the Open Science Foundation

OK, we are not in any way whatsoever going to advocate for these next ones because we firmly believe that since they are not really legal it’s for good reason and not because these big publishers have massive lobby efforts and are taking our tax-payer funded research under hostage in what was supposed to be one of the first truly revolutionary and democratic mechanisms human society created since the written word and the printing press…

1. Facebook groups and Reddit forums do exist for peer-to-peer article sharing. We aren't going to say what they are, but they do exist in a legal grey area. 

2. Sci-Hub. Google it because the site keeps getting chased around the world. It’s Napster for scientists to download articles. For you Gen Zers- Napster was where you could download all the music and viruses you wanted for free back in the day in a massive peer-to-peer file sharing platform.