The Science Fair

Having at one time been young and infinitely naive and now being old and finitely capacitive I have a tendency to try to pass on the legacy of my experience to my oldest son. Unfortunately I have almost no ability to consolidate the events that allowed me to learn from what I now perceive as being paths to disaster. I've always had great confidence in myself to stand about 6 inches over the horizon and see what's coming, what it might do to me (or for me) and how best to handle it. For some reason I just can't seem to transfer that same level of confidence to my son. Maybe if I could see the world in his eyes I might realize he has the same talent, or maybe all I'll see is video game images a la first person viewpoint.

His big task in school the last several weeks has been to research, prototype and document an item ultimately to be included in his HS's science fair. His original plan involved levels of water in various size hoses and tubes to see what they would do. After he and I going through the plan we decided it didn't make a lot of sense (fill the various size tubes with water and measure pressure at the bottom) and instead decided to persue demonstrating how force can be applied to water in tubes, essentially hydraulics.

Now, understand my son isn't a big believer in providing feedback nor is he stellar in the arena of initiative. But once he puts his mind on something he can certainly persue it to the end even if that end is completely in the wrong direction or 100 yards beyond the edge of a cliff. He'll still be twiddling while approaching terminal velocity, oblivious to the upward motion of all around him and the inevitable meeting with the ground below. This takes a certain amount of reigning, as I explained to him one time to always make sure that what you're trying to accomplish is attainable (even if you're the only one who believes it is).

We built a prototype of a piston driven hydraulic setup. The plans became modified a dozen times over, going from a ballast supplied system (which, after review, we realized simply wouldn't do anything at all) to a closed system. The prototype had two upward tubes (simple ABS plumbing parts) of different diameters and a 'sealed' piston to compress the hydraulic fluid (water in this case) and record the effects on the other piston. Unfortunately we couldn't get the pistons to 'seal' no matter how hard we tried. We reviewed and revised the designs, added thick lubricants to help reinforce the seal...nada. Weeks went by and we were getting to crunch time. Classmates had theirs nearly done, documented, tidied up, and there's my son with little to show except a pair of leaky tubes.

So, on advice from his teacher, we changed the whole setup to use prefabed pistons (syringes) and we devised a sealed system (aquarium air-line tubing and connectors) and managed to form a sealed hydraulic lift system using one very narrow syringe as the activator and a large diameter one for the lifter. Then over a period of three nights built a display setup and stands to aid in measuring (it's very difficult to balance weights on the tiny end of an insulin syringe), and also managed to throw together a practical application display where we put 3 syringes together to mock up a disk braking system. He's a bit depressed that the original work had to be abandoned, he so wanted his nifty looking tubes and pipes and steel-rod pistons to work, but we can't persue what simply will likely end in failure. I'm hoping he's accepting of the new design and it seems he and his classmates had great fun pressing the various pistons and watching what happens. Today he's got a ton of work trying to get measurements and numbers and I have to just hope it all works out without being there to offer guidance.

And I reflect back on my own venture into the Science Fair arena. Me and a friend were trying to build a very basic digital logic system (this was before the days of PC's and it was nothing more than two switches and some lights) and a comparable analog system (although this failed miserably as we had no means of being able to build an output display). We had literally no help from our parents and teachers, persued blindly and abandoned to somehow have something to show, and stood with a rather ratty looking display that mimiced someone having emptied a box of garage junk onto the floor and this is how it fell together. Yet, we won a prize (only because there were less entrants at the fair then there were prizes to be handed out) and came away feeling that we somehow managed to accomplish something worthwhile.

I don't know which outcome my son would rather have, whether the tried and failed original, or the functional 'plan 2'. But I've got at least one more late evening on this one as he has to put together an information display and we cross our fingers hoping it has at least something to do with whatever his original intent was.