ISEF and Science fairs

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Hi! I would look for local or regional science fairs near you, those are where participants for ISEF are chosen. As far as research goes, you're going to need a project to submit as well. Typically you will need

- A paper

You will need to write a research paper. This will need to include:

a Title

Table of Contents

Introduction (which is like a 5 paragraph essay where you talk about your rationale, why you're doing the research, what research has already been done, the purpose that your research hopes to accomplish)

Materials Methods and Procedures (Where you write out all materials used, and a detailed procedure) (my projects have been engineering, so I have a design, creation, and testing procedures)

Results (where you take a page or two to discuss your result and show your data (have data, lots of tables and graphs)),

Discussion and conclusion (where you use statistical tests on your data to determine if it's significant, sources of error, impact of your research, etc)

And finally a bibliography for all the source's you'll cite in your introduction, along with Appendices if necessary.

Next you'll need a poster, which is like mini paper, it has the important bits from your introduction, procedure, results, conclusions, and bibliography

And you'll of course need a project! Find something you're passionate about that is testable and measurable. For computer science you could do something like an algorithm to predict forest fires (a project at my school last year). I actually did bioengineering for my project, I created a glove for people with neurodegenerative diseases, and in my second year of the project made it to my state science fair and a special research conference in my state.

If you have any questions, please let me know! ISEF is generally very very competitive, I go to a school where everyone is required to do research and still only 3 projects a year make it. Please let me know if you have any questions! I've done research for the past 3 years as a senior at my school so I'm pretty well-versed haha and can provide you some of the resources our school gives us like helpful links.