“Wow there’s so many people here!”
As students step into the large convention center, the hundreds upon hundreds of students and their science projects fill the room. Each project is an amalgamation of the hundreds of hours of work that every student spends on their topics, with countless judges roaming every aisle, looking for anything that catches their keen eye.
The Synopsys Science and Technology Championship, presented by the Santa Clara Valley Science & Engineering Fair Association, is an annual science fair competition for students in Santa Clara County. Taking place every March in San Jose, Synopsys is the first step for students in Silicon Valley to qualify for the state, national and international level for science fairs.
This year, a total of seven students participated in the competition through Palo Alto High School. Grand Prize Alternate Vince Wu, who is a sophomore at Paly explained the experiences he gained participating in the competition.
“It was almost a year really from starting the genesis of it and data collection, to really finishing it and presenting it,” Wu said.
The Synopsys Championship has a total of 14 fields of study that students can choose for their project, including Animal Sciences, Computational Biology, Mathematics, Mechanical Engineering, and more.
In Wu’s case, he used machine learning to predict the activities of honeybees based on weather conditions.
As for the judging process itself, students have a set of criteria they must follow. These include having a project board with information about a student’s project, their project itself( if applicable), and a project notebook which details all of the information about what experimentation was conducted, along with its safety.
“It’s nice because it’s an in-person fair. So you get there, you set up your poster board and the judges just come in, like at whatever time they want, and they give you a very quick interview with questions about your project, where they try to, I guess discern the quality of it,” Wu said.
Synopsys offers over $60,000 in sponsored awards, as well as category specific awards for Grand Prize, Grand Prize Alternate, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Place for each respective category, with the top 12 projects from the competition qualifying directly to the International Science and Engineering Fair, and a further 130 qualifying for the California Science and Engineering Fair.
“Yes Yes, I will definitely participate in Synopsys next year,” Vince Wu said.
