Elementary Division Parents—Questions and Answers
Who Can Participate?
The Austin Energy Science Festival serves students from Central Texas whose projects won at their schools’ science fairs. This includes Bastrop, Brazos, Burleson, Caldwell, Fayette, Lee, Travis, Washington, and Williamson, and northern Hays counties.
Science Festival also serves charter and home-schooled students from these counties. Home-schooled students and students from schools with no science fair must submit a Request to Participate.
If your child’s school has no science fair, talk with a science teacher about organizing one.
How Will My Child Benefit?
A science project integrates many diverse skills, including reading, writing, math, statistics, ethics, critical thinking, computers, graphics, scientific methodology, and public speaking.
The journey to and through Science Festival is one of self discovery. It teaches children to develop questions into formal, testable, and solvable problems; it helps prepare them to approach life's challenges systematically. Learning outcomes and finding answers offer powerful self validation.
Elementary participants who continue through high school might even proceed to the State and International levels. There, they can compete for extraordinary prizes, including fully-paid college scholarships and internships at major research centers.
How Can I Help?
While your encouragement is the most valuable contribution, your eye on safety is the most important.
You may offer guidance wherever you can, but the project should reflect your child's individual effort and design. The project's performance at Science Festival is less important than what your child accomplishes and learns.
Your child might need help with: selecting an age-appropriate project; planning and managing the project timeline; getting to libraries, museums, nature centers, universities, and more; technical work, such as construction or photography—or, for the youngest, drawing straight lines; and explaining the project to an audience—you might, for example, play the role of a Science Festival judge and ask probing questions.
REMEMBER:
The most important possible outcomes of your child's project are the joy and learning that come from scientific discovery.