What causes the judges at a science fair to sit down and take a second look at a science project? Is it how well it is displayed? Or how much data has been processed to gain results? Is it something that can be played with like an interactive game? Or is there some more elusive detail that makes science projects impressive? A science project is usually impressive if it has possibilities.

A plastic eating microbe was isolated by researchers after a high school student in Canada did a science project based on them. It got him the first prize and a whole lot of media exposure. Why, because the project had possibilities. Using this microbe in landfills with plastic could reduce the rate of decomposition of the garbage by 40%. That would have an impact worldwide.

Software that speeds up your computer was what a high school student came up with. Making computers go faster usually needs more memory, but instead the student here used a software to analyze how programs were running and spread out their needs over all the CPU to make everything function faster. The computer firm that paid him $50,000 for the software sure knew its possibilities. There are any number of such science projects with possibilities out there, all you need to do is find them.