Context and scope

The International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) is the top science fair in the world. Competing at ISEF required a multi-step qualification process through either: district or state. After winning your project’s category, a grand-award competition advances a subset or winning projects. College Park High School, a public high school in Northern Houston (and my alma matter), has sent more finalists to ISEF than any school in the world since 2014.

During the sumer of 2018, I first scraped the science fair abstracts database, abstracts.societyforscience.org out of curiosity. A simple class-based file parser was built. Each project’s title, awards won, school and more were exported as a CSV file to Excel. This represented my first Python project after converting from a Java-only prior (and C#, but that is basically Java if we are being honest)./ From the initial dataset, only a plot showing a rise in machine learning projects over time was created.

In 2019, the scraper was quickly rebuilt using beautifulsoup and pandas. Both the parsing code and the data set were made openly available on Kaggle. One of my high school friends was going to do an analysis on this dataset as a science fair project. However, due to extra-curricular conflicts the prospect of doing a science fair-based science fair project was dead.

The dataset was forgotten about until 2023 when during my first-year of college I became reinvested and decided to do a proper analysis and article on the dataset.

Goals and non-goals

Demystifying ISEF is the primary goal of the project. Both through a tangible exploration of common advice passed around and creating a visual exploration of projects.