> Others are like "Here's a robot I built" and it's cool but not really novel.
It might be novel to the student. What I mean is that IMO, science fairs should be more about the students exploring and learning/using the scientific method, even if a similar experiment has been done thousands of times before.
An issue with that, especially now that they might go to LLMs for bibliography / exploratory work rather than google or a library, is that they may be exposed to the solution before even really tackling the problem.
Maybe that's fine, but it seems to me like it spoils the fun.
It might be novel to the student. What I mean is that IMO, science fairs should be more about the students exploring and learning/using the scientific method, even if a similar experiment has been done thousands of times before.