Well, CWSF 2026 is over. The display boards have come down at the Edmonton EXPO Centre. Our finalists have flown home, heading straight back into the last weeks of school, final exams, and whatever comes next. Summer is right around the corner. The STEM fair season is officially closed.

…and yet. Reflecting on last week, I’m left with a sense that we’re still just getting started.

That’s the thing about CWSF that’s hard to convey to anyone who hasn’t been there. Yes, it’s a competition (393 finalists, over 250 judges, nearly $2 million in awards and scholarships), but that’s not what people remember. What they remember is the floor of the EXPO Centre on judging day: hundreds of students who have spent months with a single question, finally getting to talk about it with someone who truly wants to understand it. Students swapping pins from their home regions with new friends they just met twenty minutes ago. A talent show where the same kid who created a low-cost device to track involuntary tremors gives us goosebumps with their rendition of Never Enough. A finalist lounge that stays busy until bedtime with chess tournaments, card games, and the ringing of laughter echoing the halls.

There is a specific kind of community that forms when you bring together almost 400 curious young people from every corner of the country, surround them with scientists, judges, university researchers, and peers who share the same need for answers. It doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because events like CWSF (and our regional STEM fairs) exist; because a group of people decided, back in 1962 and every year since then, that this was worth doing.

This year’s fair drew more than 8,500 school visitors to public viewing and the CWSF STEM Expo, brought media coverage across every province, and gave all finalists a stage in Edmonton where their questions were recognized as the extraordinary things they are.

The season might be over. The curiosity isn’t.

Liam Desre, a Grade 9 student from Kingston, Ontario, won Best Project – Discovery for ΛCDM+S: Thermodynamic Cosmology, a project that proposed a new model for the universe’s expansion, one that works without invoking dark energy. It is a bold idea from a fourteen-year-old, but Liam’s passion for the topic and his amazing ability to communicate a complex topic to a wide audience, makes this an exciting project.

Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student from Waterloo, Ontario, won Best Project – Innovation for Eigenpulse, which identified and corrected a demographic flaw built into pulse oximeters, the devices used to measure blood oxygen levels in hospitals and clinics everywhere. That flaw, present in the technology since it was developed, produces less accurate readings for patients with darker skin, a disparity that has contributed to higher mortality rates among Black patients. Gurnoor fixed it from first principles.

Platinum Awards also went to Siddharth Patel (London, ON), Audrey Cowen (Toronto, ON), Willem Vuurmans (Vancouver, BC), and Siddharth Rajesh (Toronto, ON) for projects in planetary defence automation, antifungal resistance, brain disease drug delivery, and AI-powered disease diagnostics.

Earlier this month in Phoenix, YSC’s eight-student Team Canada delegation came home with fifteen awards: six Grand Awards and eight Special Awards, at the world’s largest youth science competition. Evan Budz topped it off with the $50,000 Gordon E. Moore Award, one of ISEF’s highest honours. Plus, 2 Grand Awards and 3 Special Awards were shared by the two other Canadian delegations. An incredible showing from Canadian youth!

The science fair season is over. Exams are coming. Summer is almost here.

But Liam’s question about the universe didn’t start at CWSF, and it won’t end there. Gurnoor’s work on pulse oximetry didn’t begin when she registered for the fair. The questions come first. The community: the fairs, the judges, the friends met over pin trading and late nights in the finalist lounge, is what convinces a young person their question is worth pursuing.

That’s what CWSF is for. That’s what YSC is for. That’s what all of this is for.

Have a good summer.

— Stuart

P.S. If you were in Edmonton last week, I’d love to hear about it! The moment that surprised you, the conversation that stuck with you, the coolest project you saw. Hit reply and tell me all about it.