> How the F can you have a STEM contest that doesn't reward the most innovative solution?
It's frustrating - but a competition that truly didn't care about anything except the best solution wouldn't have limited entry to high school kids!
When I was in high school, I was the only kid with a home computer (this was some time ago!) and the only kid whose dad had a CNC machine shop at his beck and call. So I won quite a lot of prizes. But even with those resources, I didn't win 100% of the time.
Maybe some competitions inferred from my work that I'd had an 'unfair'. Maybe they couldn't tell how much of the work was of my own hand. Maybe they feared becoming a competition for 'best parent' instead of 'best student'. Maybe they were trying to encourage students and judged I didn't need any encouragement, or that their scheme to encourage more students into engineering wouldn't work if the prizes always went to someone with a parent who was an engineer.
The good news is, loads of competitions didn't really give a shit about those things, and were happy to give me a prize. You've just got to enter more competitions until you find ones that you win :)
It's frustrating - but a competition that truly didn't care about anything except the best solution wouldn't have limited entry to high school kids!
When I was in high school, I was the only kid with a home computer (this was some time ago!) and the only kid whose dad had a CNC machine shop at his beck and call. So I won quite a lot of prizes. But even with those resources, I didn't win 100% of the time.
Maybe some competitions inferred from my work that I'd had an 'unfair'. Maybe they couldn't tell how much of the work was of my own hand. Maybe they feared becoming a competition for 'best parent' instead of 'best student'. Maybe they were trying to encourage students and judged I didn't need any encouragement, or that their scheme to encourage more students into engineering wouldn't work if the prizes always went to someone with a parent who was an engineer.
The good news is, loads of competitions didn't really give a shit about those things, and were happy to give me a prize. You've just got to enter more competitions until you find ones that you win :)