Regardless of Aiden's findings about solar energy his ability to see a pattern in tree branches and ten to attempt to answer the question why is impressive in my books.
The problem is: there are plenty of 13-year-olds that apply the same astuteness to ants, pet rabbits, pocket calculators and other things that are not really interesting to the mainstream.
So the reason why everyone is excited about it is that there's a hope to get a contribution towards a socially relevant problem. Except there's not, because no one is there to explain to the kids how to design an evaluation for their solution that makes it possible to relate it back to the important problem.
As a comparison, consider a cake baking contest in which only the participant himself/herself is allowed to taste the cake where everyone else can only look. This would not be a recipe to develop good-tasting cakes, even though you probably get some very beautiful cakes made out of styrofoam by people who believe that styrofoam tastes great.
Besides giving up the claim that science fairs are more relevant to science than high school orchestras are to music (because, reasonably, a high school orchestra delivering a crappy performance of a virtually unknown piece may still make some kind of contribution), another possibility would be that somewhere between regional and state levels, participants get expert advice on their creation and formally have to factor in the expert advice into a revised version of their experiment.
Cake artists use fondant to make gorgeous high-price wedding and party cakes with intricate and beautiful decorations, but that taste awful.
It makes one wonder why we have an industry of cake art instead of wedding sculpture. I guess people appreciate the time-limitedness of the artwork for some reason.
So the reason why everyone is excited about it is that there's a hope to get a contribution towards a socially relevant problem. Except there's not, because no one is there to explain to the kids how to design an evaluation for their solution that makes it possible to relate it back to the important problem.
As a comparison, consider a cake baking contest in which only the participant himself/herself is allowed to taste the cake where everyone else can only look. This would not be a recipe to develop good-tasting cakes, even though you probably get some very beautiful cakes made out of styrofoam by people who believe that styrofoam tastes great.
Besides giving up the claim that science fairs are more relevant to science than high school orchestras are to music (because, reasonably, a high school orchestra delivering a crappy performance of a virtually unknown piece may still make some kind of contribution), another possibility would be that somewhere between regional and state levels, participants get expert advice on their creation and formally have to factor in the expert advice into a revised version of their experiment.