Raul here (CTO at ProjectBoard) to share a story about our amazing experience at State Science Day, in Columbus Ohio, in partnership with the Ohio Academy of Sciences.

This was my first time attending a in-person science fair, so I wanted to share my first impressions because it was truly inspiring.

First of all, upon arrival Jason Buccheri (Chief Partnership Officer at ProjectBoard) and I were put straight to work setting up dozens and dozens of poster boards, easels, bags and awards for the event. And I'm not exaggerating, there were hundreds of students, and parents in attendance, all winners of a Superior+ rating on their science projects in a series of competitions at the school, district and then state level throughout Ohio. It was like a university convocation, everywhere I looked there were so many keen students and very proud parents!

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As students began to pour into our beautiful venue, aptly named, The Union on OSU campus, I got the chance to meet so many amazing kids in middle school and high school. It quickly became apparent that age is just a number when it comes to these students’ commitment, learning and application of STEM concepts.

I met a girl whose Dad would drive her from their farm to the local hospital to get WiFi to upload their science project onto ProjectBoard; I met students receiving awards from the EPA Ohio for their work on microplastic detection and decomposition; I met several stellar high school students doing almost graduate level research on the development of biomarkers for Osteoarthritis using RNA, and on the diagnosis of Glaucoma using retinal images via machine learning models; a student while visiting her family farm in India last year, was inspired to develop a Raspberry PI IOT camera system for detection of plants with pest damage and then even developed a method to identify pests with machine learning methods. 🤯

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In general these middle schoolers and high school kids were super impressive, and it actually made me feel that we should be raising the bar for MSc and PhD students!

It was also amazing to see so many brilliant #girlsinstem, like this super articulate, intelligent and budding structural engineer who built scale models of bridges in Cincinnati to see how different structures and materials would affect their ability to handle load.

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Or this incredible story of a girl adopted from China and raised by a science teacher in Ohio. She would then go onto study how different parenting methods affected identity formation in adopted children!

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All in all this was such a fun experience, and reminded me of my love for science and its quirky curiosity and experimentation. And it also served as an affirmation to my mission at ProjectBoard: to grow the long tail of STEM capacity at the school to state level by bringing more exposure to our amazing pool of homegrown talent.

Just imagine if we celebrated our science and engineering rockstars the way that we cultivated athletics? Think about how many more students could find their calling in research and development driving innovation, GDP growth and business.

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We are delighted to be partnering in this mission with Angie and Michael at the Ohio Academy of Sciences, who by the way just awarded $400,000 in University scholarships as part of State Science Day to this brilliant cohort of future doctors, engineers and scientists.

And as Angie mentions in this video below, we look forward to expanding the scope of our partnership and bringing STEM to an even wider audience in Ohio and beyond next year.

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