Speaker 1: Hey there, my name's Rishabh. I did Science Fair for over eight years, winning some of the top awards at Regeneron ISF Broadcom Masters and National JSHS. Today, I'm an undergrad at Harvard, and I still make science posters for research symposiums and conferences. In this video, I'm going to be walking you through from start to finish on how you can design a winning, masterful science fair board. I work with multiple students every week to coach them to win ISF, JSHS and other science fairs. And one thing that I always tell my students is that you guys have to make sure the primary subject of the science fair is you. You are the scientist. You are the individual that's presenting your work. Just remember, treat your poster board as an aid. It's there to help you. This video was sponsored by Poster Smith, and I've actually partnered with them to offer a promo code for you guys to get extremely fast shipping and also an amazing price for a high quality poster. More on that later. All right, so this here is my winning ISF science fair trifold board. And a ton of students email me or they write down in the comment section of the video that, hey, Rishabh, I'm, you know, a seventh grader in middle school. It's my first year competing in science fair. I have no idea how to, you know, design this sort of board. Well, don't worry, guys. I'll show you how you can design this board. But just something to consider here is that this, you know, is a winning ISF board. It's two years worth of work condensed. As you guys can see, there's a ton of small images, a ton of small text. So if it's your first year competing in science fair or to be frank, if you just don't have a crazy amount of material that you think you could even fit on a board, then you may want to go with this sort of style. This is actually not a full poster print, but rather using eight point five by eleven sheets of paper just printed in a standard, you know, laser color printer sort of thing. You cut those out and glue them onto your board or use double sided tape. And I'll give you guys the exact sort of methods that I use to assemble this board as well. But it's just something to consider at the very beginning. All right. So you want to make your science fair poster board in PowerPoint and print it out. Well, let me show you how to do that. This here is my ISF template. Right. And I created this one in my junior year of high school, ended up winning ISF, and I decided to use it for my senior year research project as well. As you can see over here. Now, that being said, I just highlighted this. There's literally thousands of elements being highlighted on this on the single PPTX took me a ton of time to make. That being said, how can you kind of get this template? Well, unfortunately, I don't really want this just floating around on the Internet and every kid kind of using this poster. So what I've decided to do is actually include it in my A to Z course where I teach students how to make a winning science fair presentation, enjoy their research, and also, you know, answer hard judging questions and really appeal with their posters and whatnot. So if you want to see my kind of master class where I teach you how to win ISF, win national science fairs, and also have this sort of a template included, along with my ISF quad chart and some other useful stuff. Go check out my course. It'll be linked in the description below. You want to just create this by hand. How do you do that? Well, let me let me actually show you exactly how I did that, right? I'm not going to gatekeep that. If you create a new presentation in PowerPoint, you can go to page set up. Over here, you can type in, you know, your width, your height. Let's say you want 48 by 36. This is pretty standard for, you know, your Elmer's trifold you'll find in Walmart, right? You scale that. Voila. Now you have your your poster. Now, the next step is, of course, making all of those different boundaries and tons and tons of lines on here. Again, tons of time that that goes into creating a template like that. But that being said, what kind of things do you need on the actual poster here on PowerPoint? Like how do you create those? Well, what you can do is you can go to insert and you can actually create these sorts of shapes. You can create, you know, squares for these different boxes and whatever you need. But what what should you title those? What should those actually be called? Some people will have abstracts. Other people won't. Some people will have hypotheses. Other people will have engineering objectives instead. Other people won't have either of those because there's a they're a math project and they want to talk about their lemma or their theorem or whatever. So that being said, there are tons of different types of projects that will need to use different templates. Typically, they're going to have two broad categories. One is science inquiry and the other is engineering. Now, you may be thinking, you know, Russia, mine has a biology or mine has a computer science, right? But at its core, there are two main buckets, science inquiry and engineering. Those can fit in any of those categories, right? You can have an engineering project in the biology category. But those are the two main types of projects. One is where you come up with a hypothesis that in this experiment, I think that the E. coli colony is going to die. Or, you know, in this experiment, I think that, you know, this specific gene will be highly expressed. That is more of a science inquiry sort of project. You're doing an experiment to answer a question. You have some sort of guess or a hypothesis about where that's going to go. On the other hand, you have your engineering types of projects. Engineering projects are primarily what I did. Those ones you instead come up with an engineering claim. So as you guys can actually see over here, I will show parts of this to you. Robustness, functionality, specifications. And that's actually specifying how you're going to build your solution, what it should have, right? The primary, secondary endpoints that you want your solution to have. And that's what you would include on your board. But roughly, there will be these sorts of sections, right? Some sort of abstract and introduction near the top. I was actually super unique in my visual abstract. One of the judges, Display and Safety Head, actually came up to me and my project and was like, we had a super lengthy conversation about your project. You're the first project that we've ever seen that's used this visual abstract thing. And we had to discuss whether or not we should disqualify, you know, you for having that visual abstract. But he said the conclusion the committee made was that because it's a visual abstract, not an abstract, you're allowed to have it on the board. And so I guess that rule is now clarified for everyone. You can have a visual abstract. Anyway, you have an introduction, some sort of background information. I like to include figures. You know, you do want to show not necessarily just constantly bombard people with paragraphs of text. So some bullet points, a couple of images here and there definitely looks nice and, you know, gets your point across. Then some form of research objectives. Again, this could look like a hypothesis or an engineering claim or some variation of that. Then in the main middle section here, what people typically do is have their methods or procedures. So here you can create a ton of different figures. Again, show, not tell is a great idea here because as an ISEF competitor, a science fair competitor, you're going to have your board hanging and then you're really just going to be pointing to the board or pointing to specific things. You're not going to be reading off your board, right? That's, you know, a negative. So you want to mainly have figures and images on your board. And you're really just pointing to those and saying, oh, as you guys can see here, this is a seventy one point nine percent improvement. Or as you can see over here, there's a dip in the graph, whatever, right? You want to point to things. And that's why I like to have a lot of images in the method section. Finally, here there's a result in the main middle part here. Again, this is like a very, you know, consistent format that I've seen across posters, and I think this kind of works best. Then on the right side, there's, again, a ton of variability in what people do. Some people will have data analysis. Other people will just go straight into conclusions. What I'd recommend is if your project involves a lot of data, let's say you're doing some wet lab experiments or you're developing a computational algorithm, you want to have some form of data analysis or statistical analysis thrown in there on the right side there. Then below that, you can have your conclusions and discussions because that's where you're really getting your point across that. What do these results mean and contextualizing those? Sometimes in the discussions, people like to toss in future work there, but I thought it just looked a little bit nicer to separate those out. So that's what I ended up going with. And then at the bottom here, this is a question that I actually get a lot. Which is about key references, because a ton of people are like, I can't fit 30 references onto my poster. Well, what you can do is use key references. And I honestly don't see a lot of people doing this, but I hope people start doing it now because this is a great way to do it. You know, print out your full bibliography, your full references in your paper, and instead only include the most important ones on your poster. I think that's a very solid way to approach it. So that's how you can kind of design this. Again, a ton of time went into putting the exact colors and I literally made vectors, sprites for all of these and added shading onto them and really spent like hundreds of hours into fine tuning this board. So as I was actually going to look for my middle school level science for poster where I printed out 8.5 by 11 sheets, I just found this poster way back from 2018 for my like seventh grade science fair project. So as you guys can see, I came a long way. I think I was using some form of a template in this one and then modified it a decent bit to come to this one. But yeah, I mean, overall, I guess the same sort of sections apply, right? You're some form of background and abstract, some research objectives, hypotheses, that sort of thing. Methods, then results, data analyses, conclusions and future works. That's sort of the rough sort of layout you should go for on a poster. That being said, how can you go about the other type of science for a poster? So this is kind of one way to do it, right? You just open up a Google Doc and you guys can actually just type in this sort of text like this and print them out straight out on an 8.5 by 11. Then you can cut those up or glue them onto your poster accordingly. I think this is a really simple way to do it. That definitely works for a lot of people. But something that's just a little bit more advanced, but I think looks a whole lot better is instead using Google Slides. And here you can create, you know, again, page set up, set up an 8.5 by 11 sort of sheet so that actually you can end up printing those out. And once you set that up, you can actually add in these sorts of headers. So just add in like a rectangle at the top, then type in some sort of text. And then you guys can print those out. And that's exactly how you can make a title as well, as you can see here. Like if you just print out this part and end up cutting this part out and glue those together side by side, you can even create a title in that way. So I'd highly recommend you explore one of those two different ways. Again, the same sort of thing applies in terms of sectioning and what material to include on your poster. But I would recommend, you know, laying those out, cutting them up on your board and then putting them on. Now, how do you actually construct a poster board? Right. You'll see some of my videos or you'll see some of these things online. Like, how do you actually get these physically onto a board? I feel like that's kind of something that's never discussed. And it's kind of hard the first time you're doing it to even create these sorts of things. So if you're just let's say you get yourself a 36 by 48 trifold. And you have your posted printer. What you can do is use double sided tape to actually just roll along the double sided tape along all the edges of the poster, as you can see here, and then paste that on top. Now, another method you can do if you print out the paper version is you can put glue on the edges or again, double sided tape and put those again laid out onto your trifold poster. And it'll end up looking something like this where you actually have those slides cut out like this. OK, so let me put you all on a little hack. And this is something that comes with years of science fair experience. And that's to use a different type of poster called a fabric poster. You won't see these super often. But as you guys can see right here, the sponsor of this video, Poster Smith, has gone ahead and printed me my, you know, one of my winning ISAF posters, as you guys can see right here on excellent, high quality fabric. I actually showed this to some of my classmates here at Harvard who are ISAF winners themselves. And they're like, wow, I've never seen, you know, fabric poster this kind of thin. It's very easy to transport as well as very, very high quality. I actually think this is much higher quality than some of the posters on that sort of glossy print or on poster paper. In addition, it doesn't really tear or anything like that. So very, very nice material. In addition to that, I was actually very shocked because I ordered my poster. And on the same day, you know, the poster was shipped and they actually promised that the delivery is within just two days. So if you're just right before that science fair deadline, you have no idea what to do. Poster Smith is your guy. And I think the strongest benefit here is really just about that setup. It was super stressful to, you know, go to science fairs with your either your tube and then unroll that with the risk of like tearing and things like that or not being able to roll it in the small enough size to fit into the container. Or then when you're laying it out, actually like taping or gluing everything on. Or in most cases, if you're going to a regional or state science fair, you actually print that out beforehand onto your trifold and then have to haul that all the way over to downtown or wherever your science fair is being held in the back of the car. It gets wet. It gets, you know, whatever it is. Fabric posters, you don't run into any of those issues. You can literally fold this up. In fact, I'm here filming at the Harvard Library and from my dorm, I straight up just, you know, folded the poster just like this. There's no creases. There's no risk of tearing or anything like this. And on top of that, it's extremely portable and light and small, right? I literally had this in my backpack. I kid you not. I just fold it up like this, put it in my backpack without, you know, any sort of worry or stress in that regard. And then I think in terms of setup, it's really nice to just be able to hang this up on, you know, your booth or, you know, put in a simple thumbtack or something like that and just have your poster ready in a matter of seconds or even minutes. So this is a highly recommended option from Postersmith.com once again. And I wanted to create the best possible deal for you guys. So that's why I've actually partnered with Postersmith to offer a special promotion just for viewers of this channel. You won't find this, you know, anywhere else online. On checkout on Postersmith, if you use the coupon code Rishabh Jain, you'll actually get $15 off the purchase, which is super cool. And on top of that, if you happen to need multiple posters, if you actually order two or more posters, you get an additional $20 off. So it's a great value. I'd highly recommend you use Postersmith. And I'll have them linked down in the description down below. Thanks so much to Postersmith for sponsoring this video and helping you guys out with printing your posters. Now, that being said, how do we actually spice up your presentation? Add in some extras to really make you stand out. So now that you've got your beautiful poster set up, there's two more things you can do. Number one is add in extras to your science fair booth, right? You can have an additional material such as a binder or a computer or a lab notebook, which really just add a little bit of a touch to spice up your overall presentation. You know, you can point to specific things from your lab notebook or let's say you're not at your booth and a judge just comes by. They can look through that extra material. And this is something that is not necessary. But I've noticed that a lot of top winners have this. This is typically because they perform some form of literature review or they write a research paper which they can add into their binder, you know, annotate out research papers, highlight things. It really looks good to show that you've put in the work for this research project. Now, these extras are a great way to enhance, I guess, the visuals of your presentation. But as I alluded to at the beginning of this video, I think it's super important that students really focus on themselves, right? You're the one speaking. You're the one conveying your science. And so at the end of the day, it really comes down to what you're saying as a part of your presentation. And as I mentioned, I coach a ton of students on almost a daily basis through Rishav Academy, which I'll have linked down in the description below. But one thing that I really like to tell students to focus on is highlighting three main points, whether it's in their background, their methods, or at the very end of their presentation, always highlight several key things that you really want judges to take away from your project. This is something that other ISEF winners have also told me. Another big suggestion that I have for students is to really work on making their tone a little bit more conversational, kind of how I'm speaking to you guys right now, rather than seeming really rehearsed and scripted, really focus on building a natural tone. This can be developed by speaking in front of a mirror or talking to parents or friends while presenting a research project. And the final piece of advice I have for you in your presentation is to remember that the audience never knows what you left out. I actually gave a TEDx talk several years ago, and one of the best pieces of advice that I received was that, you know, you can cut anything from your presentation. The audience never knows what you left out. They only know what you put in. And so for students who are struggling to get their presentation within a time limit or something like that, remember, you can always make cuts. If you enjoy this video and you want more tips to win Science Fair, click the link in the description below. Remember to use Postersmith to print out your posters. Again, great service. Thanks to them for sponsoring. And I'll see you guys next time.