[[ Late addition: Check out our Engineering TV ISEF videos ]]
Right now the students are in for a full day of judging. If you see ISEF on a resume you should consider all these students do including the judging. There are one thousand judges here at ISEF and they are professionals like yourself that are talking with the students about their projects. Most students rarely have to defend their work at this level until grad school. The projects here are amazing and many are grad school calibre.
I am hoping to get some video of this year's fair on Engineering TV but that will not be for at least a week. We still have scads of videos from recent trade shows that need to go up first. Our latest Embedded Systems Conference coverage includes ESC on Engineering TV videos.
I did get to scan some of the projects during the set up process (ISEF runs for a week). There is one that implements Scheme, a variant of the Lisp programming language, on GPUs. Looks impressive.
Of course there are plenty of robots, planes and other mechanical devices. There are a host of projects in other technology areas where I often do not have a clue to their scope including plant sciences and medicine and health. It is exciting and impressive and the level of energy is extremely high.
ISEF is run by Society for Science and the Public. It is for high school students in grades 9-12. They also run the Broadcom Masters Competition for grades 6-8. You might see a theme here with respect to companies especially when you look at some of the other major sponsors. There are lots of technology companies in the group.
Looking to help out? Check out the ISEF Affiliated Fairs list. In New Jersey or southeast Pennsylvania? Check out the fair I work with, the Mercer Science and Engineering Fair. It is a lot of fun.
Keep in mind that most of ISEF is run by volunteers including all of the judges. There is even a higher percentage of volunteers for the local and regional fairs. Our fair is 100% volunteers.
Want to get your company involved? Become a sponsor. Intel and others fund ISEF but not the local and regional fairs. In fact, there is a substantial affiliation fee. If your company has local outreach it should be supporting one or more science fairs.
Well, "I'm on vacation" so I need to get back to writing and then see how the judging went. The award ceremonies are at the end of this week. I hope our grand prize winner does well. If you are on Twitter you can check out #intelisef and #msef for tweets. See you at the fair.