Fake Science Fair Projects

About

Fake Science Fair Projects is a photoshop meme in which images or text of student projects such as science fair presentations are altered for humorous effect.

Origin

In March 2008, Something Awful hosted a Photoshop Phriday contest^[1] where users altered images from a July 2006 Fashion SWAT post^[2] highlighting some of the worst outfit and posterboard combination from science fairs. There were eight pages of contributions.

Spread

In August 2008, Flickr user Travis Pitts uploaded a collection of science fair project images under the title “photoshoppery”^[6] with a description claiming that the original projects were created by his students in class. In November 2008, theCHIVE^[6] highlighted a few of the SomethingAwful photoshops. A year later, Buzzfeed^[3] published a compilation of both actual science fair projects, including ones from a collection at PhotoBasement^[4], as well as some of the original SomethingAwful photoshopped ones.

On April 27th, 2010, Urlesque posted a compilation article titled “30 Hilarious Real and Fake Science Fair Projects Print,”^[7] which was subsequently picked up by Digg.^[8] The images saw a resurgence in fall of 2011 due to a post on image Tumblr Meme-Meme.^[5]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Search peaked in January 2011, but that month was also when the Google Science Fair^[6] was announced.

External References