As a student preparing for the BEST Medicine Engineer Fair, you’ll want to be sure you have every element of your BEST Medicine project completed by the day of your presentation.  Your project will consist of two major elements: a research paper, and a project display.  You should have both of these with you on the day that you present to the judges.

Use the guidelines below to be sure that you are ready for your BEST Medicine presentation:

Research Paper

A research paper is a formal written presentation of your engineer project.  Good research papers are well written (using proper sentence structure, correct spelling and punctuation, etc.), well-organized and contain all of the following items:

  • Introduction: A paragraph or two that state your topic, your goals, what you hope to achieve, and how you hope to achieve it.
  • Background: A general introduction to the topic of study which includes the key findings or factors that lead you to what you decided to study.
  • Hypothesis: A statement or two about what you believe will be the outcome of what you are testing.
  • Methods: Describe in detail the protocol(s) used to test your design. A person reading your research paper should be able to repeat your experiments completely on the basis of what is written in this section.
  • Results: Describe the data that you obtained from your experiments. In addition to the written text, photos, tables, figures and graphs are good ways to help present your data to the reader. Don’t forget to express your data values using appropriate units of measure (examples: 1.29 cm or 5.8 mL, etc.)
  • Discussion: Explain what your data means. State how your experiments and data support or refute your idea. This section may be the longest and most important section of your paper!
  • Conclusion: Did your ideas work? Why or why not? What would you do differently? What would you do next?
  • Acknowledgements and References: List the people and literature sources that assisted you with your project. Don’t forget to thank any people or companies who donated time or supplies for your project.

Project Display

For engineering fairs, you need to construct a display that shows off your project and all the components discussed in your research paper. Spend some time on this part of the process. It is your opportunity to showcase your hard work.

Like a good research paper, a good project display should have all of the following:

  • Start with a good title.  It may or may not be the same title as your research paper, but it should be displayed prominently.
  • Have text to summarize your project from start to finish. It is unlikely that you will be able to use all of the written text in your research paper on your display board. Select the most important points from each section to put on the board. You need enough information to convey your points, but don’t overdo it. The text should be fairly large and easy to read. If possible, use a printer rather than writing by hand.
  • Have an organized flow of information. Your display can be organized like your research paper, but make sure the different sections are placed in a logical order around your display board.
  • Use photos, figures, tables and graphs to quickly illustrate your data. It is one of the easiest ways to convey your data.
  • Include any necessary display items, especially your laboratory notebook and research paper.

PLEASE NOTE: If you require on the day of BEST Medicine any special resources (computers, electrical outlets etc.) please contact Elizabeth Barber at [email protected] prior to the event.  If you do not inform us of special project needs prior to the BEST Medicine Engineer Fair, ABIA cannot guarantee that such requirements will be granted.