I remember last year’s science fair pretty well. It was fun!

My topic was JPEG compression quality. I had different types of images compressed at different rates, and subjects rated their quality subjectively. My results showed that images with gradual color changes will appear better when subjected to JPEG compression. Normally, a compression rate of about 25% will be an optimal for most photographs.

The Judging Day was sometime in mid-March. All the science fair participants had a “field trip” with Mr. Lee to the San Jose Convention Center, where we had set up our display boards the day before. The judges came around and asked us to tell them about the topic. As this was my first Synopsys science fair, I hadn’t known what to expect, and hadn’t prepared for this. Still, I think I did pretty well. The majority of my time there was spent sitting, waiting. It was booring. There were only two 6th graders in the computers/mathematics category–that is, me and some girl from Springer Middle or something like that. She was researching game programming in Dark Basic.

The awards ceremony took place at Great America. Each person gets five free tickets, so I invited Justin along with my parents and sister. I got 1st place! The medal is hanging on the wall of my room, right behind me. :-)