Insider Events Canada-Wide Science Fair

Submitted by Liette Philippe and Julia McDevitt

May 17-21, 2021
Ottawa | Virtual

Organizing Team

• Liette Philippe, STEM Expo and Outreach Manager, Youth Science Canada
• Julia McDevitt, CMP, Fair Director, Youth Science Canada

Main Objective

Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF) is the country’s largest annual youth STEM (Science, Technology Engineering and Math) event.

It combines the following: a national science fair competition; social, cultural, and recreational activities for youth participants; an educator conference for adult participants; and an interactive tradeshow for all participants and thousands of visitors.

At the heart of the week-long event, Canada’s top young scientists compete for medals, cash awards, scholarships and other prizes worth nearly $1 million.

At the end of the week, the event offers three full days of school and public viewing during which students and visitors can engage with finalists about their submissions in the Project Zone, and experience STEM Expo—interactive and inspiring exhibits featuring ideas and opportunities in STEM.

This year was supposed to be the 60^th anniversary, but since the full event was not able to happen last year, 2021 became the 59^th. For the first time, the event was held entirely virtually.

Target Audience

Registered Participants: Across the country, students from grades 7 to 12/CÉGEP compete in over 100 regional science fairs, and the winners of these attend the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Similar to a national sports tournament, this is the national science competition. The virtual event had 900 registered participants (550 over 7 days, 350 over 3 days), which included more than 250 judges and 100+ volunteers.

Public Visitors: This event also attracted registered visitors comprised of teachers and homeschooling parents with their students, plus the general public interested in youth STEM. Our goal was to have 35,000. By the close of day on May 21, we had over 51,500 visitors registered!

Going Virtual

Since the pandemic has forced most schools and districts to move to online or hybrid learning, many teachers find it difficult to make sciences and technology engaging. Youth Science Canada seized a great opportunity to facilitate the integration of STEM and inquiry-based learning by creating ready-to-use resources to take students on a virtual tour of the Canada-Wide Science Fair and STEM Expo. All the content, tutorials and activities were designed for implementation in virtual classrooms at no cost to teachers or schools.

CWSF STEM Expo featured three days of school and public viewing, allowing visitors to engage with 60 interactive and inspiring exhibits offered by STEM organizations, government agencies, not-for-profit companies and post-secondary educational institutions. Visitors participated in daily educational and entertaining Escape Rooms, Scavenger Hunts and much more, covering prescribed learning outcomes from provincial science curricula.

Platform Integration

Four separate platforms were used to execute this event. We had a fully public facing platform, ProjectBoard by engineering.com, which housed all the student projects, STEM Expo exhibits, and a main stage that played CWSF TV and the awards ceremony.

For the participants, we custom built a platform with AV partner Encore, which housed the lab experiences, sessions, activities, trivia, city tours, chat and a photo booth. Thirdly, all the participants signed up through Youth Science Canada’s on-line registration system. And finally, the public visitors signed up through ePly’s registration tool. The challenge was to integrate information across all systems. We are happy to say that with the incredible partnerships we had across all platforms, this was very successful!

Building Community

One of the hardest aspects of going virtual was to build community amongst our attendees, both registered participants and the public visitors. We were able to overcome this by working diligently with our partners.

We hosted many sessions and experiences through the event platform. We worked with Quiz Coconut, a company based in Toronto, to create an unforgettable virtual trivia event that had attendees laughing and engaging with each other. Participants were also encouraged to interact with each other through a chat function.

We hosted an evening social event using Rally technology built into the Encore platform for people to connect with each other. We invited participants to compete in a virtual chess tournament using the lichess platform. We also created a league in GeoGuessr for students to interact with each other and play daily geographical scavenger hunts.

Our team of dedicated volunteers created branded word searches and crossword puzzles for participants to complete. We worked with MDRN Photobooth Company to create a custom experience where participants could take pictures and share them on social media. The photos and other footage was used by SM Media to create an end-of-event mosaic CWSF 2021 | ESPC 2021 video (click to view).

Awards Ceremony

It was challenging to create an energetic awards ceremony without an in-person audience. Our emcee was live from an Encore studio in Mississauga (following MeetSAFE standards) where we incorporated our branding through lighting, visuals and music.

The show was streamed live to the registered participants using Encore’s Chime Live platform and to the public visitors on Facebook Live. We contracted Hear Me Cheer, a new company founded during the pandemic to infuse crowd noise into virtual events. This technology allowed our participants to interact with one another and cheer on their peers during the ceremony. This cheering noise was aggregated and fed through the production stream.

Scripts and Translations

Another new challenge that we overcame was that every aspect of the event needed a script, and in many cases, pre-recording content. We had over 35 presenters across Canada who created content for sessions throughout the week. Each of these sessions included a pre-recorded video, followed by live Q&A sessions on the platform. As a bilingual organization, we strove to deliver as much content as possible in both official languages, including daily re-cap emails.

Branded Boxes and Keepsakes

One of the activities participants look forward to each year is receiving branded apparel and swag items. We worked with Brand Blvd. to create custom branded boxes that were shipped to 700 participants’ homes. These held over 15 items including treats from Ottawa’s Stubbe Chocolates, a t-shirt designed and produced by Spirit Wear Canada, and other swag items produced by Brand Blvd. We produced lanyards and nametags that went in the boxes, as we know these tend to be a keepsake item for our participants. The awards ceremony program and unique activity materials were also included in the box.

Given that we received final mailing addresses only two weeks in advance, the delivery timeline was quite tight. Although Brand Blvd produced many of the contents, we purchased giveaways from a few other companies. We had to coordinate very closely with Brand Blvd to ensure all of the items were received in time for shipping.

TV Show

New this year, we produced a television show that we called CWSF TV. Science-related content was contributed by our partners and exhibitors, as well as created in-house. The show was produced in an Encore studio with a single host, but each segment was introduced by a different volunteer from across the country. The program was pre-recorded and stitched together to create three hours of original content daily for three days.

Virtual Pin Trading

A highlight for our participants in the live events is pin trading. Attendees arrive from all provinces and territories with pins from their respective regions, so they can return home with a lanyard full of swapped pins. We wanted to replicate this experience virtually and our partners at ProjectBoard were able to make it happen. Participants and exhibitors created pins and exchanged them over the platform. At the end of the event, they received a PDF document that captured all of the pins they had collected through the week. Over 10,121 pins were exchanged!

Pin trading was a completely new build for ProjectBoard. We wanted to ensure that the activity would add value for participants and be done in a safe, collaborative virtual environment. ProjectBoard made sure that the platform included a procedure for both parties to agree before trading.

Best Week of the Year!

In a year when most of Canada’s youth have spent a large amount of time on their computers, we wanted to make sure this event was fun and memorable. We were overwhelmed by how involved the participants became and how much they interacted with each other and engaged within the platform. We have received a lot of glowing feedback including comments such as “this was the best week of their year!”

As we look forward, we know that the planning work that was done this year will only benefit future events, be they completely virtual or hybrid.

 Article compiled by Melanie Hudson, retired MPI Ottawa member