Science Fair Season

Someone ought to give Judy Dutton a pat on the back (if not a medal) for her latest book, Science Fair Season: Twelve Kids, a Robot Named Scorch...and What It Takes to Win. The reason? It's bound to kindle all sorts of enthusiasm and excitement for science.

One way of looking at Science Fair Season is to see it as the story of the 2009 Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) as experienced by several of its student competitors. Of course, ISEF is arguably the world's most prestigious high school science fair, which by definition means that these are no ordinary high school students that Dutton has chosen to follow. One managed to cobble together a nuclear fusion reactor as his science project. Another became a living case study refuting preconceptions about a dreaded disease. Yet one more would develop patents worth millions of dollars. And so on.

There's no mistaking that Dutton's book is an easy reader about science experiments, albeit one that shies away from the minutiae in order to appeal to a broader set of readers. But it's not necessarily watered down, nor is the book strictly all about the science, per se. It's also inevitably about the unique subculture surrounding science fairs in America, which can translate to thousands of dollars in scholarships and prize money for deserving projects. As such, both the level of commitment that participants devote to their experiments and the quality of these projects, as depicted in the book, are simply remarkable.

But the real draw of Science Fair Season is that it is an anthology of human interest stories -- the different students Dutton profiles -- bound together by ISEF 2009. As such, the book is an interesting peek about the way science and science fairs can change people's lives. Be it the way that science opens up children's imaginations to better things, or how working on a science project is a constructive outlet for even the most wayward of students, or even how having a deserving science fair entry creates opportunities for scholarships and the like, the underlying message is loud and clear: being a science nerd can be a rewarding, fulfilling, life-changing experience. That, and the simple fact that science can be cool, too.

In his State of the Nation Union Address on 25 January 2011, US President Barack Obama opined, "We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair." Judy Dutton's Science Fair Season will go a long way to help make this happen.

[This review is based on a pre-publication proof obtained through NetGalley.]