Article by Miguel F Aznar

Five days before the Santa Cruz County Science & Engineering Fair, the County Office of Education canceled all large gatherings. More than 300 students and 100 judges at the County Fairgrounds in Watsonville would have been a large gathering. What to do? I’ve been the lead judge for years and a judge for decades. I had never seen anything like this. 

Jen McRae, County Science Coordinator, started creating a virtual fair. By the next morning, hundreds of students, who were still working on science or engineering projects, received new instructions: upload photos, upload your report, make a video. Upload that, too. We’re not canceling. Jen coordinated with schools to support students with limited resources to upload their work.

Students from counties that did cancel—Monterey County and more than a dozen others in California—started calling Santa Cruz to see if they could enter our fair. We would like every child to have opportunity to explore and present science and engineering, but we have resources (thanks to Plantronics last year and Poly this year) for students in our county.

The 100 judges are teamed up 10 or fewer by category (Behavioral Science, Chemistry, Engineering, etc.). Each category has a lead judge, so we invited those lead judges to our “control center” at the County Office of Education on March 14, just days away.

While students finished their projects and did the extra work of video recording and uploading, lead judges organized their teams. Jen and I shared a spreadsheet with lead judges. It showed matrices of projects and judges, and would hyperlink to the student uploads. It would figuratively link the leads and their judges because they would not see each other.  The threat of a pandemic kept the judges at home, connected by computers and phones to both their leads and to students.

Students stayed home, too, waiting that day of the fair for judges to watch their videos and then call. Leads wrote call times in the matrices of judges and projects. Judges conference-called with students, asking about their projects, their findings, and their data. They recorded scores and comments—praise and helpful suggestions—online.

At the County Office of Education with about 10 lead judges, it was quiet. Nothing like the energy of hundreds of simultaneous conversations sounding through the cavernous hall at the fairgrounds. Nothing like the sea of brightly illustrated project boards, every detail carefully chosen, sometimes agonized over. At that quiet control center, I worked to get lead judges information on projects, on students, and on our new and untested procedures.

And then I started to hear things. Judges said that online information was easier to access than hunting the fairgrounds for project boards. Telephone interviews with students were undisturbed by the echoes of hundreds of other conversations. Interactions were free of the visual distractions of crowding between projects. The fair we had to settle for was actually working.

No one claims it was perfect. Students scrambled to satisfy new, unexpected requirements. And not all were able to. Judges and students missed the in-person connection, pointing to project boards and apparatus. But the alternative, taken by some other counties, was to give no venue to any students, to make it impossible to advance to state and international fairs. Covid-19 hit and then something amazing happened in Santa Cruz: the Science & Engineering Fair was not canceled.