My Daughter's Science Fair Project

Tonight was Science Fair night at my kid's school. My daughter Megan (who was recently accepted into the Gifted & Talented program) had her project on display with all the rest of the 5th graders' projects. I wandered down the hall looking for hers, perusing all the others along the way. I saw the 3rd place project, very impressive. I came upon the 2nd place winner, also very impressive. Scattered along the way were numerous Honorable Mentions too. I turned the corner and saw Megan up ahead, waving to me, pointing to where her project sat.

When I got to it, I noticed something a little different about it - the blue 1st place ribbon hanging from the top. Just the night before she had told me that she didn't even get an Honorable Mention, which was true. She had gotten much more! (little imp! has her father's sense of humor)

Now, it's on to District competition. I pity the other kids.

I've always heard that you can never feel as much pride in your own accomplishments as could be felt for the accomplishments of your child. Tonight I finally understood that.

The project was created using a gift I got her for Christmas, called Eyeclops, which is a video magnifier with a built-in lcd screen or you can connect it to a tv. It takes still and video images at 100x, 200x or 400x, and stores them on a usb flash drive. We took pictures of many different things, and she decided to do a poll on whether people could tell whether the object was natural or man-made. As a secondary question, people could also guess what the object actually was.

Here are the pictures, can you guess a. natural or man-made and b. wtf is it? You can click on the image to see a larger version and what it is, but don't cheat! Guess first!









Update: Tonight (2/17/09) they announced the winners in the district competition, and she received an Honorable Mention award out of a field of about 50 entries in her category. Awesome!