About
Monta Vista Demo
A working demonstration of the platform. Every project, person and record here is invented.
What this is
A place to plan a science fair project, keep a record of the work while you do it, and publish the result somewhere permanent when you are finished. One project moves through five stages, from the day it is registered to the day it is published, and publication is the last of those stages rather than a separate thing to apply to.
What it is not
It is not a peer reviewed journal. Review here is editorial, performed by named reviewers with faculty oversight, and every published record says so. Claiming more than that would be the fastest way to lose the trust of exactly the reader this is built for.
It is not a ranking or grading system. Nothing computes a readiness score, nothing ranks one project against another, and reviewer scales are never averaged into a number. A number would become the thing students optimize and the thing a disappointed student argues with, and it would be a worse decision aid than the facts it replaced.
It is not an advertising business. There are no ads, no data sale, no profiling, and no third party analytics following you between sites.
Why the public half is open
A student at a well resourced school has a parent who knows what the forms are, a teacher with time, and often a family friend with a lab. A student without any of that misses a signature deadline and is disqualified before running a single experiment. That failure is procedural, not intellectual, and software can catch it.
So the guides, the season each school runs, and the record of what commonly goes wrong are open to read. Everything a student needs to prepare well is available on the first day, before anyone signs up for anything.
The software
SciPath is free and open source. Any organization can run its own copy, hold its own students' data, and keep operating whether or not we do. The source is public, licensed from the first commit.
Monta Vista Demo runs on SciPath.