STEM Education Across the County

K-12 STEAM education

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Our goal is to provide an opportunity for high school and junior high school students to learn to be student scientists and engineers, and for them to have a chance to present their work to professional scientists and engineers so as to increase their own understanding and to gain a measure of self-confidence in their ability to learn and to grow intellectually. An additional benefit to students is that the science fair gives them a leg-up in pursuing a college education. What is currently missing and desperately needed is an adequately funded program that will bring the state finals back to Los Angeles as a live event after a half-decade of frustration. In 2025, we managed to hold a live, in-person science fair for the first time in 6 years, but we had to hold it in another county due to funding issues. We want to return to L.A. County (ideally close to downtown L.A.) and establishing it as our permanent home.

The modern state-final science fair is far different from what previous generations came to expect. Student scientists are encouraged to do original, innovative work and to test their ideas on our judges, who are professional scientists and engineers. The student may meet a designer of orbiting satellites or someone doing cutting edge research in gene therapy. In order for this to happen, we have to hold the science fair as a live, in-person event. This includes procuring an event space which, if it were held on a football field would extend out to the 50-yard line.
Reaching the CSEF is the goal for student scientists, who compete at county and multi-county level fairs in order to reach the finals. It is our job to provide this opportunity.
We are particularly proud that our fair serves students of all genders, races, and countries of origin. We hope to be able to reach out to more underserved communities in the near future.
Rebooting CSEF from scratch, we have learned many lessons and hope to spread what we have learned through the creation of a new, peer reviewed online journal.
Our single largest cost is venue rental for most venues with adequate space, followed by rental of display tables and associated materials. Our venue in 2025 (in another county) very much wanted to host CSEF and consequently covered most of these costs. We do not have a comparably motivated venue in L.A. County.

The science fair enables a learning experience for students in their formative years which can be profoundly important to many. In fact, we have science fair alumni who say, "The science fair changed my life." But the science fair is also a recruiting tool for the colleges and universities that either host the fair or are nearby, because it allows for these institutions to recruit from among the best young minds in the state. The fair brings students and families into this educational environment. Los Angeles County continues to have some of the premier aerospace companies in the world, but these companies need to continually recruit fresh talent. In addition, we would very much like to interest students from local underserved neighborhoods to start thinking about STEM careers. The science fair encourages and promotes all these things.
At a more direct level, the science fair brings income to the county through hotel rentals, purchase of restaurant meals, and transportation costs.