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2004's Science Talent Search Winners Are In
Slate is running an article about this year's Science Talent Search (concentrating on things like whether the participants are "weirdos"); there are better descriptions of the top entrants' projects at this results page. Congratulations to the winners!
I was a finalist in the Westinghouse STS in 1995. The only help I got from my parents was their encouragement because they sure as hell didn't understand the work I was doing.
Some people have an advantage due to their parents, but some do it on their own. It'd be kinder to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Actually it's just poor webpage design - the images are enlarged slightly within the IMG tag. If you go directly to the url of the JPEGs they come out fine.
"Studies have shown that people who eat peanuts live longer than those who do not eat."
I volunteered as a judge a couple of years ago when the Intel STS had their finals in San Jose. As you interview all the candidates, you can definitely see that some of the students are coached in the area of expertise of a parent, some are directed by university staff that they study under, and some of these guys are just so smart that it's absolutely scary.
In that first category, there was an interesting coincidence that I knew and had indirectly worked with the father of one of the students. His project was related to image compression technology which is what his father did. He was conversant in the area, but you really got the feeling that his research had been very closely directed by his father.
You don't see the second type so much in computer science, but in areas like biology, you find that many of the students are working in college labs assisting researchers. This is about the only way that a high school student can study things like protein synthesis or recombinant DNA techniques - no high school would have the equipment or expertise. I guess nobody told them that they were too young to be working on their Ph.D, and that's good.
One of the outstanding projects in our year was a kid whose project had to do with modelling the chemical processes that are involved in doping semiconductors in fab. One of the other judges who had specific experience in this area was blown away by his work, and it was clear to everybody that interviewed him that he loved the topic, loved researching it, loved constructing the experiment, and clearly had gotten no help from anyone. He got high marks from all the judges (must have been about 80 judges in Computer Science alone, all professionals or college-level professors, no high-school teachers), but ultimately didn't advance because it was clear that his project was miscatagorized into computer science because it was a simulation when it probably should have been in Chemical Engineering or some sort of Materials Science.
If you ever get a chance to participate as a judge, or better yet as a mentor/sponsor, do it!
Also, just a note - this contest is sponsored by Intel now, but is the same contest that Westinghouse sponsored for many years.