Una Feria de Ciencias

About a year ago, maybe more, I took an online assessment about leadership...namely how I lead.  The results were that I prefer not to, but I will take on leadership roles if necessary.  But getting people to follow me isn't high on my priority list.  I will assign tasks to others in my group, and if they do them, great.  If not, it usually takes less energy for me to complete them than for me to convince others why they need to be done.

I mention this, because I was asked/informed last August that I was going to be putting together the Science Fair for the year.  That, and the date (March 15), was pretty much all the information I was given...not too much to go on.

I mostly ignored it last semester, because March seemed so far away.  It came back to me about the beginning of February that something was coming up that I needed to think about.  In the middle of February I sat down with the principal and asked her what exactly she was looking for with the Science Fair.  I was told that each high school student was either supposed to pick a topic to research and report on or was supposed to do an experiment.  This was supposed to be something outside of class time - a project on their own.

I brought it to the students.  The younger two picked topics to research.  The older ones wanted to do experiments...but not research experiments...they wanted to do demos.  Part of this is I've done demos for them, and they kind of wanted to do the demos themselves.

I was really nervous about it for some reason, and I think it goes back to my feelings about leadership.  This wasn't something I could control and this wasn't something I could take over.  I was "in charge" but I wasn't really doing anything during the Fair except for introducing who came next.  I didn't have many guidelines for it...which in some ways is a good thing, because I'd rather be given freedom than given a strict set of instructions.  In other ways it was uncomfortable, because I know from experience that my vision of something rarely follows other peoples' vision.

It went well.  The students had fun for the most part, I'm pretty sure the spectators enjoyed it.  It's a little flattering that half of the demos were ones I had shown the students.  Another demo was one I've done in the States but not here.  For all the students doing demos, I did make them give a scientific explanation of what they were doing and why it worked...they couldn't just decide to do a fun fire demo.  (Three of the four demos dealt with fire...and no I'm technically not teaching chemistry down here, but there are many places where fire demos can fit...)  Some of the younger students were there as well, and hopefully seeing the demos (or the fire stuff at least) sparked an interest in them.  They seemed to think it was pretty cool.

I tried to upload pictures but the internet is being too slow here, so that's not happening.  That may come later...for now I need to get back to work.