Science Fair, a documentary about teenage competitors in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, is “unfailingly charming,” writes a New York Times reviewer.
The movie was named festival favorite at the Sundance Film Festival, beating Inventing Tomorrow, which also looks at finalists in the 2017 fair, reports Mark Walsh in Education Week.
“While Inventing Tomorrow explored in depth the science behind the science fair projects by its featured subjects (which included topics such as tin ore processing, crowd-source monitoring of bodies of water for contamination, investigating ground soil for arsenic contamination from tsunamis, and an idea for photocatalytic ceramic paint to purify air), Science Fair has a lighter touch,” he writes.
We meet Kashfia, a Muslim girl at a sports-obsessed South Dakota high school, whose science fair successes go unrecognized but who forms unlikely ties with the school’s football coach as her science fair mentor. Robbie is a math whiz from West Virginia who nearly fails his algebra class but scrounges computer parts in junkyards for his artificial intelligence project.
Both movies are “inspiring and fun,” writes Walsh.