01 / CONTEXT
A community effort, operating at scale.
Every year, the Calgary Youth Science Fair brings young scientists together with educators, volunteer judges, sponsors and organizers. The Society describes the fair as a volunteer-run charitable initiative normally attracting approximately 700 projects and almost 1,000 students from more than 100 schools, with more than 550 volunteer judges. The fair represents approximately $1 million in combined resources, including cash funding, in-kind support and volunteer contributions. These figures describe the event and its resources, rather than a claim about software usage.
Delivering the fair means coordinating the entire journey: schools register, students develop and submit projects, safety and ethics requirements are assessed, judges evaluate work, and the community celebrates the results.
02 / THE CHALLENGE
One event. Many people, stages and responsibilities.
A student needs a clear place to register and prepare a project; a school coordinator needs to manage invitations and selections; committee members must review ethics and safety information; and judges need access to the projects and evaluation process relevant to their teams. Organizers also need to manage awards and communicate across this community.
Each stage has its own deadlines, information requirements and decision-makers. On judging day, hundreds of judges conduct thousands of judge–student engagements over the course of a few hours. Many judges are working at once, returning to projects, entering and updating scores, and documenting their interactions throughout the morning. The challenge is to keep assignments, incoming results and decisions connected to the right projects and people as the fair unfolds.
03 / THE PLATFORM
Built around the full fair lifecycle.
Our principals developed the Society’s platform through their work with the Calgary Youth Science Fair Society. It brings together school and student participation, project information, online safety and ethics forms, review workflows, judging, awards and communications.
The platform supports distinct roles for students, coordinators, judges and administrators. Its fair stages organize work from registration and project selection through check-in, medal and award evaluation, deliberation, publication of results and certificates. Project records connect information across those stages so organizers can work with a coherent view of the event.
Behind that experience is a coordination problem across the whole fair: projects may have multiple students; safety submissions move through review; judge teams need assignments and evaluation records; and awards must be connected to the right projects and participants. The platform supports review queues that distinguish new, updated, viewed and approved safety forms, with project-linked communication for questions and decisions.
Administrative reporting brings together assignment sheets, project and evaluation summaries, awards, certificates and ceremony materials. The system has to keep information useful to different committees at different times, while the people responsible for the fair retain control of review, scoring and final decisions.
For a volunteer-led organization, the platform brings many teams into a shared operational environment while giving participants a clearer path through the annual process—from an initial registration to the celebration of their work.
04 / REAL-TIME EVALUATION
From thousands of conversations to decisions that count.
Judging is a live, multi-stage operation. Multiple judges interview each project, often more than once, while many other teams are working at the same time. The platform supports the capture and updating of judging information and feedback throughout the morning; teams bring their assessments together into a consensus score for each project. Organizers need a live view of which projects have been evaluated, which teams still have work to complete and where results need attention before the next round.
The platform brings together judging assignments, project marks and evaluation records to support rankings and medal decisions. It calculates medal cutoffs using project scores, with separate elementary and secondary distributions and room for committee-set cutoffs. The award round adds another layer: eligible projects, judge preferences and sponsor awards must be coordinated with the correct students and projects.
From there, the system supports prize allocation and produces the information behind winner lists, certificates and ceremony materials. The platform helps organizers move from a fast-moving stream of judging data to a coherent set of results, while judges and committees remain responsible for evaluation and final decisions.
05 / PUBLIC BENEFIT
Technology in service of a mission.
The fair is about more than managing an event: it gives young people a place to investigate questions, share their work and learn from the scientific community. The platform supports the people who make that experience possible, from the student entering a project to the volunteer reviewing it.
Our principals’ work with the Society reflects experience designing for a nonprofit’s actual operating needs: connecting community participation, structured review and the day-to-day work that makes an ambitious event possible.
PUBLIC REFERENCES
Further reading
Calgary Youth Science Fair Society: about the fair ↗
Calgary Youth Science Fair: registration and project process ↗
Calgary Youth Science Fair: judging information ↗