[ModernMech]

On the one hand, I understand why this can seem disheartening; we want the kids to be pure and protect them from the BS of the world. It would be great if we could just allow kids to play around with science, and there's no pressure to compete or perform.

At the same time, the reason they're doing the CV padding is because we, the adults in control of those systems they wish to gain access to (which is not the science fair), have made it so they need to pad their CV in the first place.

So as much as we want them to be purely driven by curiosity and independent exploration, our society at large does not allow for that kind of thing. Fixing those kinds of macro incentives doesn't happen by reforming the science fair.

If we want curiosity driven independent exploration for children, our society should provide that modality for adults. That we don't provide it for adults is reflected on our children; because we impose credentialism on adults, the adults understand credentialism is important to success and they impose it on their children. If adults understood that creative inquiry and independent exploration are paths to success, then more children would be encouraged to pursue that at the elite level.