AT THE END OF LAST MONTH, Bremerton hosted the largest Washington state science fair to date with some 800 students. That’s bigger than some entire schools, the fair’s executive director Caroline Stein and I laugh. Kitsap’s been home to the state fair for decades, anually sending students to the international fair and beyond. The whole thing has its roots in the late-50s, so the story goes, when a Bremerton mom wanted both her son and her daughter to be a part of the school fair in a time when girls didn’t really participate in science. We caught up with Caroline, who’s been involved with the fair for 25 years, to fill us in on the history…
CAROLINE: “So the story is… she had a young daughter and a young son and they were both in elementary school. She was a Bremerton PTA mom, and she wanted both her son and her daughter to participate in the fair. Back then little girls didn’t really participate in science. So she did a letter writing campaign and made it so that all kids could come to the elementary school science fair. And that kind of started the whole thing. It’s really pretty remarkable. So this started here 68 years ago… In 1957, we began as the Kitsap County Science Fair. That morphed with Olympic College. So you had the elementary school fair (that Bremerton PTA mom) and Olympic College join together to create the Kitsap County Science Fair. The fair was expanded to include Mason and Jefferson counties in the 1970s, and, at that time, engineering was added. And the name was altered to reflect that change. In 1984, the fair became the Western Washington Science and Engineering Fair and was open to all students in the western corridor, you know, I-5 to the ocean. During the decade of the 80s, the decision was made to affiliate with what was at that time the INTEL International Science and Engineering Fair. They contacted us because they could only have one of these per state and they wanted us to do it. And we said… ‘Ok!’ So there’s only one in the state. Every student, public, private, parochial, homeschool, tribal, matters not. Kids are kids. Science is science. Put them together and make them one.”
SO HOW DID YOUR INVOLVEMENT WITH THE FAIR START… “Well, there’s a little bit more history there…”
OH, YES, PLEASE! BY ALL MEANS… “We were affiliated with INTEL at that time, and we expanded to go across the state when we did that. We went from the Western Regional to all the way across the state. And beginning in 1985, we started sending students to the international fair which is now called the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. They shorten that to ISEF. We are sending nine projects, up to 27 students, from our fair this year to the internationals. And we will join with our regional fairs that are under our umbrella, each of them will be sending students to the international fair as well and that becomes the WISE Team—Washington International Science and Engineering Team. Last year, there were more than 1,700 students from around the world—including 49 states and 67 countries and final selections were made from more than 1,000 judges from academia and industry—and our WISE Team earned an amazing amount of awards. You gotta remember there are 1,700 students worldwide. Out of our team, we took twenty students from across the state, and they earned 12 awards. Global awards. Out of our 20 students, we brought home 12 global awards! It is tremendous what they do. You’ve got to come to the fair… By the way, one of our students, just to give you an example of how this goes on, one of our students came to the state fair in Bremerton and he won first place. We then nominated him as one of our selectees to represent us at the international fair. And he came in first place there. Five thousand dollars! He then took his project and entered it into the Regeneron Talent Search, earned seventh there for a cash award of $70,000!”
WHOA… HOW COOL, THAT KID IS ON THE FAST TRACK… “He is on the fast track. He has developed a way, he basically applied his passion for radio control aircraft and wing design and decided that he could make something that they’d only talked about into reality. He took a 3D printer, made an airplane, made the wing oblique and improved flight efficiency by 9.2 percent, and proved it. They are making inroads everywhere. I could give you stories from the youngest first grader on up. He’s only one of our top earners. We’ve had two others… One of them took 10th place and the other one took first. Two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars! I’m just saying, first and best in the world. NASA called me because they wanted to know how she developed her mathematics to prove what a black hole gravitational pull was. So I put them in connection and they sent her to NASA to talk to their scientists, to show her project and her math. From there, they sent her to Hawaii to the big Gemini telescope and said, ‘Here, take three months, and look at the stars, and tell us what you see.’”
MASSIVE… AND THAT ALL LAUNCHED FROM THIS FAIR IN BREMERTON? “That is correct. Bremerton is truly the crown jewel of this. We attract every student, not only the premiere projects that are earth-shaking inventions or discoveries of today, but also we foster and create that base of our workforce, of our educational force, of our backyard inventors. They may not make these great big discoveries such as the gravitational pull or the oblique wing but they do something just as important. They create a stability in our state, for our workforce and for our future. It’s tremendous.”
QUITE TREMENDOUS AND ELOQUENTLY SAID… “Well, thank you. I hope I didn’t bend your ear too much.”
NOT AT ALL, IT’S FASCINATING. I WISH WE HAD MORE TIME… // BILL MAN
THE WASHINGTON STATE SCIENCE & ENGINEERING FAIR happens the last weekend of March in Bremerton every year. More at wssef.com
