Google is back with the world’s biggest online science competition and is asking for submissions. Google Science Fair is a global online science and engineering competition open to individuals and teams from ages 13 to 18. Once again, Google has partnered with LEGO Education, National Geographic, Scientific American and Virgin Galactic to offer some great prizes to the winners.
This is an amazing opportunity for the students of science in Pakistan to showcase their talent on an international platform.
Google Science Fair has an impressive track record of enabling the world’s young scientists to thrive. These young scientists take on serious issues like world hunger and the energy crisis. They have worked on projects that enable us to diagnose and treat diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. They have engineered flashlights that are powered by hands and created plastics from banana peels. Moreover, the Google Science Fair has disbursed almost $1 million in scholarships to the world’s brightest minds, and to date sent four grand prize winners on trips around the world to further their scientific passions.
The entries to the fair are judged based on eight core criteria, which include the student’s presentation, question, hypothesis, research, experiment, data, observations, and conclusion. Then three finalists are chosen to be awarded prizes that range from foreign trips to scholarships. Google’s own employee Tom Oliveri talks about the company’s early days:
Science fairs help students to explore their vision and curiosity through science. Our company was founded on an experiment. We firmly believe that science can change the world.
Last year, Google Science Fair saw some amazing creations from three 14-year olds – Lauren McKenzie who built an automatic soil watering system, Shadab Karnachi who designed a low-cost gaming device for people with visual impairments and Peter He who developed an innovative wireless virtual reality system.
The global finalists were announced on August 4, 2015 and the winners on September 21, 2015. The Grand Prize was won by Olivia Hallisey (16) with her project ‘Temperature-Independent, Portable, and Rapid Field Detection of Ebola via a Silk-Derived Lateral-Flow System’. The Google Technologist Award was won by Girish Kumar (17) for his project ‘Revup: Automatically Generating Questions from Educational Texts’ and the Incubator Award was won by Elliott Sarrey (14) with his project ‘Bot2karot: Manage Your Vegetable Garden via Your Smartphone’.
Students from over 100+ countries will be participating in the fair and all will have a unique idea on the platter. Google requires these students to be innovative, thoughtful, and eager to help make the world a better place. It believes that the solutions to the world’s biggest problems don’t lie in the hands of the old, but in the minds of the young. And these young people need a chance and a platform to make their ideas come to life. The best part is, there’s no limit to a young mind’s imagination and because there’s no limit, there’s no problem that cannot be solved.
So if our Pakistani students can take straight A’s in their O & A-Level exams, there’s no reason they cannot put the theories they learn in school to good practical use.
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