Guidelines for Project Registration
Project Registration Timeline
- Registration form opens: February 23, 2022
- Registration form due by: March 16, 2022
- Poster Submission deadline (paper and electronic file): March 30, 2022
What you will need:
1. Title of Your Project
2. Your Research Advisor's Name and Email
This is the name and Penn State email of the professor with whom you spent the most time discussing your project. The advisor's name and email are required fields on the submission form. In order to insure that your project gets classified properly and judged appropriately, it is very important that you accurately list your research advisor. If other advisors contributed to your project in addition to the lead advisor, please indicate their name(s) only on the submission form.
3. An Abstract
The abstract is a summary of your project. A good abstract gives the reader a quick idea of what your project was about, why it was worthwhile doing, and what your key results were (yes, an abstract is often a spoiler). Your abstract can be 150 to 250 words.
Types of Projects
1. Poster Projects
This is different from the topic. Instead of asking "what was the project about", this is asking "what kind of activities did you engage in while working on your project?" Was it a creative endeavor? Did you read books or articles? Did you interview people? Did you perform experiments? Did you do any statistics? Did you build or design something (including a piece of software)?
Accurate classification of the type of project you did is important, as it determines on what criteria your project gets judged.
On the registration form, you will have to choose among the following options:
- Creative endeavor
- Liberal arts research (searched for and read books or journal articles, and/or interviewed people
on historical facts, used the reading to support an idea) - Design (built a structure, made a robot, wrote a piece of software, made a pamphlet, developed some teaching material, a marketing strategy, etc.)
- Scientific Research (designed an experiment or wrote a survey, performed experiments, collected responses from people, collected financial data on the internet, used statistics to analyze the data, made graphs, etc.)
- Theoretical Research (proved a theorem)
- Conceptual Research (conceptualized and planned a research project but did not collect data)
Project's broad topic:
This helps the organizing committee place your poster in the appropriate area and assign the right judges to it. Your choices on the registration form are:
- Registration timeline: To be determined for 2022
- Arts and Humanities (includes: Art, History, Literature, Music)
- Education
- Engineering (includes Mathematics)
- Science (includes: Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Geography, Geology, Physics)
- Social science (includes: HDFS, History, Psychology, Sociology)
- Health (includes: Exercise Science, Fitness, Nursing)
- Business
- Technology (includes: Programing, Security Risk, Social Media, Websites)
If you are unsure of which category to choose, ask a professor who is familiar with your project.
Poster Project Registration for 1-6 students (judged)
Poster Project Registration for 7 students or more (not judged)
2. Oral Presentations
- Registration timeline: To be determined for 2022
- Panels will be organized by a common topic or by discipline; such as history, literature, or social science.
- Panels should consist of a maximum of four or five students.
- Oral presentation projects are judged.
Oral Presentation Registration
3. Written Work for Exhibition
- Registration timeline: To be determined for 2022
- Work may be fiction, poetry, or creative non-fiction.
- Work may be selected from several short poems or a piece excerpted from a larger work of poetry, fiction or creative non-fiction.
- Written works for exhibition are not judged.
4. Visual Arts and Creative Works
• Project registration timeline is: To be determined for 2022
• The work should show a high level of technical skill and an intentional concept.
• Visual Arts entries are not judged but will be displayed in an online gallery.
• Each submitter may present 1-3 individual pieces of artwork.
• Each piece should be submitted separately. 3 dimensional art should have 3 viewpoints of each piece.
• You will need Project Title, Project Medium / Materials, Photo of the project taken with cell phone or
digital camera, Explanation of Project, Size of Project and the Class for which project was completed