As a judge, the project which left the biggest impression on me was for all the wrong reasons. It was ostensibly a “physics” project, about what a universe made of antimatter would be like. His “experiment” was essentially a long-winded ramble about how it would be exactly like our current universe (except that what we call “matter” would be called “anti-matter,” of course!), fueled by a single reference (some puff piece in Scientific American). He had a hypothesis and a conclusion, but no procedure, data, or results.

Then there were all the projects where the kids changed their methodology partway through or made incredible leaps of logic to try to justify their hypothesis from data which didn’t fit it (they didn’t realize that disproving a hypothesis is much more important than proving one!).

Okay I guess I kind of went off on a tangent-rant there.