Unleash the Potential of Computer Science Fair Experiments

The computer age has ushered in an era of unprecedented creativity and innovative potential among people of all ages - but especially among young people who have grown up immersed in the world of computers. Science for kids needs no longer involve simply replicating what others have already done. You - yes, you - can perform amazing computer science experiments that push the boundaries of what is known and what people can accomplish.

• Computer science fair ideas can involve writing any kind of program of any level of complexity. Think about a computational process that requires a lot of routine work - say, solving a fairly elaborate formula. You can get a computer to do the busy work for you. Try writing a program where you just put in the initial conditions of a particular kind of problem, and the computer solves the problem for you. For an example, take a look at this quadratic solver. Can you do something similar with another commonly used formula?
• Computer science fair experiments can harness the power of spreadsheets to go through vast amounts of data and enable analysts to draw conclusions. In your computer science fair project, you do not need to gather any data yourself; hundreds of agencies around the world have data publicly available on a vast variety of subjects. But you can create a spreadsheet to analyze the data in an original way, comparing two or more parameters in a way that has not been done before.
• Or you can do a computer science fair project that accomplishes an immediate practical goal, like tabulating the grades for a class easily, or computing statistics for various kinds of games and performances. You can also create spreadsheets that tell you what grades you will need on subsequent tests in order to get a certain grade in a class.
• For interesting computer science fair experiments, you can even do statistical surveys of students in various kinds of classes to see whether there exists a correspondence between particular kinds of grades in one class and particular kinds of grades in another.
• For instance, do good grades in math correspond with good grades in English, or does there exist a negative relationship? Using Microsoft Excel or other spreadsheet programs can enable you to generate a lot of graphs and charts that will help you make sense of virtually any data set.

Cool computer science fair experiments can be aided by science fair software.

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