2024-2025 Science Fair
General Information
How to enter the Science Fair
Ralston’s science fair is Wednesday, February 5th, 2025. Deadline to submit or update your entry is Friday, Jan 17th.
Please sign up through this form, even if you aren't sure about a topic or specific project. You can always update your information later. Students are welcome to participate individually or in teams of up to three! Remember, anyone can participate and all Ralston students are welcome!
Upcoming Mentoring Sessions
Please attend a virtual mentoring session, where you’ll get to interact with real-world scientists, engineers, and experts. Don't miss it!
Session 1: Monday, Dec 09 at 6pm,
Session 2: Monday, Jan 13 at 6pm,
Session 3: Monday, Jan 27 at 6pm, via Google Meet.
Detailed information for students
The Ralston Science Fair organizers have established rules and policies that you should read carefully as you plan your entry. You'll be presenting your project using a Google slides template (Experimental projects, Engineering projects). Please note that if you are planning a project that uses humans, animals, bacteria or tissue, you'll need to submit an additional form for approval.
We have detailed information for students about how the judging and community event will run. Please review the FAQ document (we'll add more updates to it as questions come in).
So you want to enter a science fair…
Let’s do it! Students from all backgrounds and experience levels can enter science fairs and have a fun and successful experience. To enter a science fair, the main thing you need is to have observations about the world around you that you can turn into a testable question. You don’t need to have previous experience or special equipment or expertise.
If you’re not sure how a science fair works, you might want to check out this animated video - it starts out kind of silly, but hopefully you’ll see that you can follow straightforward steps to create a science fair project.
Science fairs start to finish
We strongly recommend you check out some resources from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab: a step-by-step guide from generating ideas, to framing your ideas as a testable question, to designing the experiment, and then evaluating and communicating your results.
I don’t know what project to work on!
Here are some resources to help you find a project idea, if you don’t have one already.
Topic selection guide - interactive tool where you indicate interest in different areas and get back some structured ideas.
Examples of past winning projects
I need more help!
Stuck? You can contact us at sciencefair@ralstonmspta.org with additional questions. We’ll be closely following the San Mateo County guidelines. You can get a sneak peek at those, including Google Slides-based templates to share your results, at this site.