ISEF winning projects

Every ISEF project in the archive that placed, browsable by tier and by category — with the abstract the judges actually read. Winners are worth studying for how a question was framed and bounded, which is most of what separates a placing project from a competent one.

By award tier

Grand Award placings are awarded within a category. A First Award in Robotics and a First Award in Chemistry are both firsts; neither is "first at ISEF".

By category

Open a category and filter it to a tier from there, or start from the whole category to see placing and non-placing work side by side — which is the more useful comparison if you are trying to work out what the bar is.

What a win does and does not tell you

Judging weighs the research question, method, and the student's command of their own work. It does not weigh how expensive the equipment was, and a striking number of placing projects are built from parts a school can afford. If you are reading winners to calibrate scope, read several in one category and one year: a single project tells you about that project, and a cohort tells you about the bar.

It also does not mean the question is closed. A placing project often names what it could not test — sample size, a control it lacked, a condition it never got to. That sentence in someone else's future-work paragraph is the most reliable source of a real project there is. How to find and use those →

Winners by year

Each year page holds that cohort; the award chips on a fair page cut it to placings.

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20,037 projects, 2014–2026, from 4 competitions.

Browse every project Check whether an idea has been done →