When Laura Brewer, academic special programs manager at the UGA Center for Continuing Education & Hotel, gets a question about the Georgia Science and Engineering Fair (GSEF), she usually has an answer. After 13 years with the UGA-based GSEF, 10 of them as director, she knows the procedures and policies, categories, awards and people from the state’s business, university, military and tech communities who commit their time to judge the more than 500 projects entered each year by middle and high school students.

But ask about another state’s policies, awards, judging processes or best practices, and the responses will vary. While science fairs across the world have requirements set by the Society of Science that participants must follow, there are no common recommendations or standards for how a fair is structured or how outreach is conducted within local, regional, state or national jurisdictions.

That may be changing, however. A few long-time science and engineering fair directors from across the U.S. this summer launched the Science Fair Director’s Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, to provide directors an opportunity to discuss common concerns and network. Brewer was among the 50 directors selected to attend the inaugural event in Kansas City, Missouri, in September.

“There is no substitute for experience and learning from each other’s experiences will introduce us to new ideas for growing and improving our science fair programs,” Brewer said.

Brewer says there sometimes is a misconception that science fairs are just big once-a-year events, and that running one is just about reserving tables, ordering food and deciding where to put all the microbiology projects.

“It is those things, but there is so much more that goes into fair administration throughout the year, like overseeing, maintaining and developing resources for a network of feeder fairs, establishing and overseeing a Scientific Review Committee to review hundreds to thousands of research plans to ensure the proposed projects are safe, ethical, and follow all rules,” she said.

It also includes creating tools and procedures for student and project data management, and nurturing community and partnership-based alliances with businesses, organizations and educational institutions to ensure continued sponsorship and volunteer support, she said.

“Many of us operate our programs independently with little to no outside expertise to call upon. You can’t google how to deal with many of the issues that come up,” Brewer said.

For instance, regional fair jurisdictions are traditionally based on geographical boundaries of school districts, she said, but there are increasingly new types of educational models, such as cyber schools or summer research programs, that don’t really fit this structure.

“Science fair is incredibly competitive and it’s critical that we maintain strict and clear policies for how a student can advance through the system,” Brewer said. “But shifts in the educational landscape bring up questions about how we do this while maintaining equitable access.”

In addition to the ongoing responsibilities, fair directors also now are grappling with concerns about AI and how to ensure students are presenting their own authentic work.

“By collaborating with other fair directors, we can pool our unique perspectives, resources, and connections to navigate these challenges together,” Brewer said. “Not having this opportunity to collaborate has probably resulted in many of us reinventing the wheel every time we see a need for improvement. Perhaps the most validating thing I learned at the institute is that we have all come to similar conclusions about best practices for running our fairs, but many of us have creatively solved our challenges in different ways.”

“The value in sharing our own challenges and solutions comes from taking what works for each of us and finding inspiration in ideas we would not have had on our own.”

The institute intends to invite a different group of science fair directors to the conference each year, holding each group to a limited number of directors. After a few years, Brewer said, she imagines the institute will evolve into a more universal resource and networking hub.

Thousands of students in Georgia participate in local and regional science fairs across the state each year with top projects from each region invited to participate in GSEF, facilitated and hosted by the UGA Center for Continuing Education & Hotel. The top four winners from GSEF go on to the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), held this year in Los Angeles. This year the winners included Daniel Williams, 18, a student from East Coweta High School, whose project ZenithSoar X-4 is an autonomous drone that provides viable robotic detection of survivors during disaster relief efforts.

For that project, Williams was awarded the Chief of Naval Research Scholarship Award, which includes a $15,000 prize.

ISEF and the Science Fair Director’s Institute are sponsored by Regeneron, a biotechnology company based in New York.