[worldvoyageur]

Best science fair I ever saw was at a remote construction site near Qinshan, China in 1999. Many Canadian engineers lived on a camp by the site, building two nuclear reactors [1]. The camp also had a school for the engineer's children, literally one room with a teacher and about twenty children from grade 1 to grade 8 [2]. It was a good school, the teacher excellent and the kids clearly loving it. The older kids got a lot out of helping the younger ones. There was excellent quality recent school work in evidence on the walls. Though I did occasionally pop by the school when I'd visit the site, I usually didn't.

On one of my site visits I was asked if I wanted a detour from the project site to check out the school science fair. I later figured out that the minor scheduling difficulties I had around that particular visit was so that I'd be there on the day of the science fair.

Every student had a project. There were a few of the usual suspects, like the baking soda volcano and potato battery. However, those were the exception. Most of the projects were astounding, well beyond what I'd seen as an engineering undergrad in university.

The kids, standing proudly in front of their project and the bristol board explanations, knew very well how to explain the project and had a deep understanding of how it had come together. They'd definitely done the work and were justifiably proud.

That said, the majority of the projects were such that they could only have been the product of many evenings and weekends over months of father[3]/child working together. I'll assume that work on the next science fair would have begun the day after the science fair I saw wrapped up.

1. Qinshan III, units 1 and 2; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qinshan_Nuclear_Power_Plant.

2. High school was a boarding school back in Canada.

3. I'm pretty sure that all the engineers were male, for I'd be remembering a female engineer, but the school kids were a balance mix of boys and girls.

[lowbloodsugar]

I have friends where the dad works, and the mom runs the household, but the mom is just as good an engineer (or better). Since you're acknowledging and explaining the issue with [3], perhaps just using "parent" would have been better.

[worldvoyageur]

I appreciate the observation.

While I understand the logic of using parent, as a general rule I'm uncomfortable deliberately substituting words with less information when a word with more information is available.

It'd be like seeing a flock of geese fly over and saying birds. If you weren't really sure they were geese, or thought maybe a few were not geese, then maybe you write 'birds'. However, if you saw geese and it would have been striking and obvious if one or more of the birds was not a goose, then more information is given saying geese rather than birds.

If there had been a female engineer at the site, working or at home, I'm pretty sure I'd have known. This was rural China in the late 90s. A live in nanny would have been available at very low cost. Plus, the hunger for engineers willing to live at a camp site in rural China for months at a time was such that had there been any engineer spouses, they'd have had to make a very deliberate decision NOT to work.