Fake Science Fair Projects

Confirmed 178,690

Part of a series on Something Awful. [View Related Entries]

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 (examples below).

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 (examples below).^[8] The images saw a resurgence in fall of 2011 due to a post on image Tumblr Meme-Meme.^[5]

How Much Sawdust Can You Put In Rice Crispy Treats

In January 2018, an alter version of one of the photos included in the original Something Awful post of a boy in front of the sign that reads "Will There Be Minorities in Heaven" began appearing online. On January 8th, an anonymous 4chan ^[9] user posted the image, however, the heading on the sign was altered to read "How Much Sawdust Can You Put In Rice Crispy Treats Before People Notice" (shown below).

That day, the image appeared on the /r/meirl ^[10] subreddit, where it received more than 4,000 points (99% upvoted). Several days later, the image was posted on the /r/MemeEconomy ^[11] subreddit, received more than 9,000 points (91% upvoted) and 140 comments in less than 24 hours.

Over the next week, more variations of the meme began appearing on both /r/MemeEconomy and /r/dankmemes (examples below).