How to properly continue your project from last year

When you have a project that inspires you to keep asking questions and finding answers, it can make sense to continue it from one year to the next. These continuation projects can be seen at regional STEM fairs and at the Canada-Wide Science Fair (CWSF), and while it is wonderful that your idea has continued to grow, it is important to understand what is acceptable in a continuation project, and what is likely to be a problem.

What is expected

A continuation project should be the same amount of work and effort (or more!) as starting a completely new project. It may have the same theme as your previous project, and can be built upon the things you learned, the data you collected or the innovation you built, but a continuation project needs to present completely new experimentation or innovation development with new results.

 

The following table gives examples of continuation projects that would be acceptable and those that would not be. These examples should help give you an idea of what is expected of continuation projects, but there may be situations not covered.

Acceptable continuation project	Unacceptable continuation project
New and different experiments to further validate the hypothesis explored last year	Collecting a greater volume of data using essentially the same experiments and samples
A much greater variety of samples studied with substantially redesigned experiments	Identical experimental protocol and similar number of samples applied to different materials
Entirely new methodology applied to a problem you previously studied	Substituting one model of lab equipment for another that functions on the same principle
A substantial improvement to an innovation that required considerable redesign	Aesthetic or minor improvement to an innovation that required minimal changes to hardware and/or software
Substantial improvements to a program, requiring rewriting of core elements of the code base or entirely new addition(s)	Aesthetic or minor functional improvements to a program that do not change the functionality
Generalizing a computer program to handle a wider range of problems	Applying software developed the previous year to a different data set

ProjectBoard

If you are participating in a regional STEM fair that uses ProjectBoard to virtually display your project, or you are a finalist in CWSF where it is required, you need to make sure your continuation project has completely new ProjectBoard content from the previous year. You should have so many new developments that last year’s text simply won’t work. In fact, if you can just make minor edits to last year’s ProjectBoard content based on your new data, it’s probably a sign that your project hasn’t evolved enough to return it to a STEM fair.

 

For continuation projects, your ProjectBoard must indicate briefly what you did last year, (we suggest in the Why? section), but the focus should be on your new experiments, observations or designs. A continuation project must cite the previous versions of the project(s), including the URL to their ProjectBoard(s). The ProjectBoard Entry Guide includes examples of various citation types, including how to cite websites such as a ProjectBoard.