Once a year, our courtyard fills with baking-soda volcanoes, hand-built circuits, and posters covered in careful handwriting. It is easy to see the Science Fair as just a fun day off the usual timetable, but it does something the regular syllabus rarely gets time for: it lets a student own a question from start to finish.
In a normal class, a student is usually solving a problem someone else defined. At the Science Fair, they pick the question themselves, often after several false starts, and follow it all the way through to a result they can explain in their own words.
That process, choosing a question, testing it, being wrong, adjusting, and presenting what was actually found, is closer to how real scientific and engineering work happens than any single textbook chapter can teach.
We will keep making room for it every year.