Even the easiest of these items—researching a topic—is nearly impossible for a child who hasn’t yet mastered the ability to browse the Internet. (As a parent and the founder of a tech company, I’ve observed that in order to browse the Internet one needs to know how to scan the screen, differentiate between actual content and ads, and evaluate the trustworthiness of a resource—elements that are far out of reach of most 8-year-olds.) I should also note that none of those three categories was a topic that had been covered in his science class, which instead was studying the food chain.

An often unspoken sentiment, which Dave Barry gave voice to in a children’s book about rich kids who buy their science-fair projects, is that there’s something inherently unfair about science fairs. These events often turn out to be a competition among parents—not children. And many children don’t have the luxury of parents who have the time to engage with their schoolwork. This dynamic became obvious to me the night before last year’s fair, when I spent over an hour building a model of DNA out of licorice and gummy bears. And it is probably obvious to anyone who has ever stepped foot into an overheated gymnasium chock full of tri-fold boards, irritable kids and their over-eager guardians. Lots of research supports this observation, with one University of Toronto study of four national science fairs in Canada concluding that students from "advantaged, resource-rich backgrounds" were more likely to both participate in and win these competitions.

Shree Bose, who won Google’s first science fair in 2011 and is now a junior at Harvard, told me that she started noticing signs of parental over-involvement when she was in elementary school: children with beautifully presented boards and sophisticated, completed projects that were clearly the work of adults. And at the higher-level competitions, she again vied against students whose projects, she said, clearly benefitted from the help of parents.

"I had a state science fair once where my project was pretty simple but I had done it myself," she said. "The kid next to me had the exact same project except with [what looked like] five more years of work. And I thought: I’m definitely going to lose. And then his dad came by. He was a professor and the son had worked in his lab."

In addition to favoring kids whose parents can either spend time or money (or both) on a project, many science fairs seem to include little in the way of actual science. A scientific experiment, by definition, includes an exploration of the unknown. But at the three fairs I’ve attended over the last several years, the unknown rarely makes an appearance. At my son's fair last year, at least a handful of students did the popular "experiment" in which the "scientist" waters plants with three different liquids—one of which is typically soda or detergent—to determine which is best for plant growth.