You are not required to present a Power Point or other technological presentation, but most students do. Each room will be equipped with a projection screen and an extension cord for such purposes. In 2009, the MN Academy of Science, thanks to the generosity of Breck School, will be able to provide projectors for all presentations and may be able to provide laptops for all presentations as well. Please bring your presentation (in a PowerPoint format) on a memory stick to upload to our laptop when you arrive. NOT ALL LAPTOPS will accept a Vista version of PowerPoint, so please also save your presentation as a 2007 or earlier version. We also recommend you bring your own laptop in case your presentation does not format correctly on the provided laptop.

You should bring 10 copies of your abstracts to hand out to the judges in your room.

If you are invited to present your paper research in the Callback round later on Saturday night, you will need to present a shorter version - you will have 8 minutes to present, with 5 minutes of Q & A. Again, you are responsible to provide your own equipment for Power Point presentations.

In the 1st round, judges score students presentations on a scale of 1-30, using a score sheet provided by the National JSHS organization. These scores are "normalized" using a popular statistical calculation that MAS uses for Project scoring during the State Science & Engineering Fair (and which is used at many regional, state, and international competitions).

The top presentations from round 1 are invited to the 2nd "callback" round to present a shorter (8 minute) presentation. Judges in the 2nd round see all the same papers and rank the paper presentations they watch. Rankings are used to determine the National JSHS winners. If a numeric tie occurs, the judges discuss and resolve the tie.