At the end of 2021, Toronto went into another Covid-19 lockdown, and my sports activities over the Christmas Holidays were cancelled. I was looking for something to do and discovered the Toronto Science Fair, but I only had about two months before the deadline, which wasn’t a lot of time. Searching online for ideas, I learned about literature reviews. I wanted to do a project that was relatable to everyday life. My younger brother has myopia (near-sightedness). So, I decided to do a literature review of the risk of children developing myopia from excessive screen time use, which I thought was very relevant since screen time increased massively during the global Covid-19 pandemic.
I used PubMed, a free online search engine that searches the Medline database of original scientific articles on life sciences and biomedical topics. Pubmed has more than 30 million citations and abstracts dating back to 1966, and it works just like google.
I found many original scientific articles on the risk of developing myopia from too much screen time. The most significant part of my science fair project was reading and analyzing these academic papers and the existing scientific knowledge and presenting that information so that kids could understand the topic. There was a lot of information, and I had to write short, concise summaries to stay within the allowable word count limits. I enjoyed being creative with the images I used and even created my own original image using photoshop.
I was super happy when I won a regional silver medal for my project!
The gold medal winners of the Toronto Science Fair were chosen to attend the Canada Wide Science Fair in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in May 2022.
Next year, I will be doing my science fair project on crime scene forensic analysis, and I will be starting much earlier to allow myself time to do some cool experiments. Hopefully, I’ll win a gold medal next year and attend the Canada Wide Science Fair.
Science fairs are great because they:
- Show a desire to learn and discover new things.
- Can be very creative.
- Develop problem-solving skills.
- Show leadership in effecting change.
- Show passion and dedication.
- Good way of distinguishing students applying for university.
- Opportunity to earn prizes.
- Gain confidence in presentation skills.
- They are fun!!!
There are science fairs all across Canada. You can find your regional science fair on the Youth Sciences Canada Website.
You can see all the different projects from the Toronto Science Fair 2022 and my science fair project here.