All students are required to spend time with the judges marking their projects, with years 7-11 interviewed and years 12 and 13 presenting their conference poster.
Students in Years 7-11 need to attend an interview with the judges marking their project. The interview is quite relaxed, it is not formal, but it is important. Interviews are a chance for judges to talk with students to find out more about the project and the depth of a student’s scientific or technological knowledge.
Students shoud prepare a 2-3 minute talk about their project which they can give to the judges. Judges may then ask additional interview questions to be sure that they understand what the project is about.
Students in Years 12-13 need to ‘present’ a Conference Poster. This time with the judges is more formal. It is much less question and answer format and students will need to take on more responsibility conveying information about their project orally. Judges will ask questions, but the delivery of the presentation is within the students control and it will be up to them to verbally convey necessary information in a memorable way.
Read more about judging criteria…
Example Interview Questions
Regardless of being a Year 7-11 doing an interview or a Year 12-13 presenting a Conference Poster, students should be prepared to answer questions like the ones given as examples below.
- Does your project make a difference or add value to your community?
- What [investigation] observations or [technology] needs or opportunities made you choose this project?
- Where did you get the idea for this project?
- What more can you tell me about your [technology] researching the need / finding out about existing solutions / coming up with a new idea / developing your solution / checking that it has the qualities those who wanted it thought were important … ?
- Now can you take me through [investigation] some of the results you obtained / [technology] development steps you carried out?
- How do you know that your data is reliable?
- How did you decide what best met the need/opportunity you had identified?
- What were the major problems in developing your idea?
- What were the main findings [investigation] which helped you reach this conclusion / [technology] helped you decide your solution met the needs of the end-users?
- Did you start out to investigate / develop… ? Did your ideas change? Are the results what you expected?
- If you were going to take this project further what would you do?
- How many trips / experiments / surveys / design cycles / … did you carry out?
- Have you measured or estimated technological aspects such as: efficiency, optimisation, reliability (and/or mean time between failure), cost-effectiveness, appropriate materials, safety, ergonomics, aesthetics …?
- Where did you get some of the other data / information?
- Did you talk to others about this project? Parents, teachers, family friends, scientists / technologists, others at school … ?
- Does your project have any
What if a student cannot attend an interview or the Conference Poster presentation?
Students who are not able to attend Science Fair judging because they are on a pre-arranged school activity or representative event may apply to the coordinator for an exemption. In which case they would be required to supply a video explaining their project plus having the board present in the exhibition hall. NOTE: This requires prior approval applications should be made at the time of entries
