Had the great privileged to be one of the judges at the Manchester Grammar School, Science Fair Projects involving about 200 very enthusiastic future scientists. Each group, of three, had to design and evaluate a scientific hypothesis applied to sport, which was the theme for this year; e.g. do balls roll faster with change in temperature, does sugar consumption relate to concentration performance analysis, …

All did very well, but there was a good debate and points raised on how to present their work results- should they use bar charts, line graphs,and what scale ranges are important and if error outliers should be included. Interesting discussion also occurred on the quality of the graphs, produced automatically by computer software programs and how to change these.

It was good at this age that they could grasp some of the concepts that seem illusive to certain older more mature researchers when they present their work. A key lesson learnt was not to spend all your effort creating wonderful results, if the presentation and visualisation story is not given a proportional amount of time to be created.