I am happy to announce she came home with...
A gold medal and a trophy!
She won first place Viewers Choice Award for grades K-2nd.
The day of the science fair there was a set of judges from a local college. They had so many projects to judge that I told her to cut her long presentation down to just a few minutes. This was a mistake I think. She skipped much of the process part of the project. She explained the scientific method parts but didn't go into detail about her process. This left the judges wondering if she had really made the robot. They asked her if anyone helped her. She innocently replied that her father did. She didn't say how, so they assumed that he did most of the work to build the robot and she was given low scores in the area of doing the project on her own without parent help.
Only the help she had, was supervision with the power tools, because no six year old girl can use a power saw or power drill without her parent there to supervise.
She did all the... "I need this cut here dad." and "I want this the same size as this one." Then he would line it up for her on the saw and stand next to her to make sure no fingers were cut off while she cut things. He also helped out with some muscle in places where she needed it, like screwing in some eye bolts, six year old fingers are not alway strong enough to get the job done.
I explained to her that always while she is little, and has ideas that are bigger than her size, people will always wonder if she is the one who really did them. I think this is a problem that plagues all gifted kids at some point in their life.
We are really not able to control what other people will think.
I explained that WE know all the work she did, and so did her friends and teachers at school since she had been telling them about the robot she was building since Christmas break when she started it.
They were not surprised by her cool creation. They did not think it above her capabilities because they know her and know what she can do and think of. She worked on it so hard and spent so much time on it.
I was of course a bit disappointed for her.
She on the other hand was totally fine. She was proud of herself. She LOVED and enjoyed showing her robot off to all of the kids at school and their parents, that is where she shined. She explained things well to them about how he worked and asked all of them if they wanted to try him out. Everyone, even the adults did want to try!
She even talked the grandpa's and dads into making him work.
I stood back by the wall out of the way and just watched her shine.
They liked her project so much that they voted for her project for the K-2nd category!
The science fair was on Thursday, and when I hadn't heard on Friday anything about the winner of the viewers choice, I assumed she had not won.
All weekend she was asking if I could find her another science fair to bring her project too. Not to be judged or to win, just so she could show people how he worked. I half way considered calling the gifted school she will attend next year to see if we could just sneak her project in, since their science fair is in another week, but I decided that was a bit too much of a "crazy mom" thing to do. HA!
Then Monday after school she walked in with her medal, and her trophy, and some bubble wrap that came around her trophy.
The bubble wrap was for her brother, and she was more excited to give him the bubble wrap than she was to tell me about her trophy!
I was surprised and of course excited and proud.
She does not get to go to the large All-City science fair since her judged score was lower than others in her category, but she was happy that "Robie" got to win something.
This is fantastic! Absolutely love the creativity.
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