• GooberEar@lemmy.wtf
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    15 hours ago

    In the third grade, I won the science fair.

    The competition was pretty strong. There was a kid who built a contraption to simulate a mini-tornado. Granted, it was probably his dad who built the thing, but still. There was another kid that built and programmed a robotics project. Again, probably his parents did a lot of the work, but the guy was super smart so I’m sure he did some of that work. One girl came up with an experiment to use fungus to grow plastics or something like that, I don’t remember. It’s been decades.

    Me? The afternoon before the fair I had literally nothing. I grew up poor, we had a lot of junk laying around the house because my parents would go to the county dump site, dig through the trash, and bring home anything they thought was valuable or fixable. I managed to hobble together one of the light sensors from a broken night light to the electronics from a toy radio so that it only played when the lights were off. I stuffed that into a cardboard “robot”. And the people judging the science fair loved it.

    So fuck you Stephanie Petty, Chris McDonald, and Dequan Shaw and your rich ass parents and your entitled ass selves. I won bitches.

    • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      12 hours ago

      I have a similar story from 2001, 8th grade science fair.

      One of the kids had a seismograph (parents) one had some bacteria thing (probably also parents, that kid was as dumb as the contents of his petri dishes) they all looked super professional and stuff and were obviously shit from books or the internet.

      I fucked around for weeks in class doing basically nothing and the night before threw together a hand written display with some info I looked up, painted a balloon and pvc pipe with paint, and stuck it on. The “project” was about the impact of static on heavy machinery and the idea of applying an insulating coating to reduce static buildup and transference on machine parts, displayed via balloon, pipe, and latex paint. Totally original idea (to me, anyway) and research and they thought it was great even tho it looked like complete shit.

      • Clearwater@lemmy.world
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        48 minutes ago

        Similar story here. I once had an assignment which was a part of an art contest with the theme “how to make the world a better place.”

        I simply took a photo of a tree and gave it the description of “I would make the world a better place by planting more native plants.”

        I got an award for it and didn’t think of it beyond that. Several years later I dated a friend from then, and it turns out I got first place in the entire school. She got second and put in effort with a drawing.