Indian and Indian origin kids dominate yet another annual Google Science Fair, sweeping 18 out of the 40 places in the 13-14 year category this year.
Indian kids accounted for all 13 nominations this year from the APAC region, which includes China, Australia and Japan.
In all, 90 students worldwide qualified for the Science Fair, out of which just about half were in the 13-14 year category.
The Google Science Fair is an online science competition sponsored by Google, Lego, CERN, National Geographic and Scientific American.
The competition is open to 13–18 year old students around the globe, who formulate a hypothesis, perform an experiment, and present their results.
“We had thousands of entries from more than 100 countries, and topics ranging from improving recycling using LEGO robots to treating cancer with a substance created by bees to tackling meth abuse,” Google said.
Children born to Indian and Chinese parents have a reputation for dominating academic competitions, especially in the United States.
However, some have pointed out that these kids tend to lose their academic edge as they grow older, when creativity and self-motivation starts playing a bigger role in academic performance. They argues that Asian kids owe their relatively higher academic ranks to parental pressure, instead of any innate advantage.
Interestingly, at Google’s Science Fair too, the proportion of Indian or Indian origin kids drops off drastically as one moves to the higher age groups.
While 5 of the 13 aspirants in the 13-14 age category in the Americas had Indian names, only 2 of the 13 in 15-16 year category and 2 of the 12 in the 17-18 year category had Indian names.
Similarly, while all the entries in APAC in the 13-14 age category belonged to India, India accounted for only 1 entry in the APAC out of the total 15 entries in the 17-18 category.
The entries can be checked here.
