FAVR Home

If you have popups blocked, the login procedure (and a couple of other things) will open a new tab on your browser instead of a popup. This may cause a confusing behavior when you complete the step, because it will return focus to the NEXT tab on your browser, if there is one. There is no way for the system to control this (which is why it uses a popup!). It is best to disable your popup blocker while you use this system, but if you don't (or can't), just be aware that you will have to move back to the favrmain.html tab to continue after the steps that create new browser tabs.

Forms Automation with Validation of Rules (abbreviation FAVR)

Overview

FAVR provides an alternative to the ISEF forms that have been required for participants in regional fairs since 1949. The system will be able to geenerate the ISEF forms, if and when a project is sent to ISEF, but the participants will NO LONGER have to fill out the ISEF forms prior to regional fair participation. It should be noted at the outset that this system is NOT affiliated with the Regeneron ISEF, although their SRC has agreed to accept forms from a system of this type. The FAVR system has been developed for the Terra North Jersey STEM Fair (TNJSF) in Northern NJ, and is being made available, on an "as is" basis, to any fair that wishes to use it. We do, though, welcome bug reports or suggestions: send those to Ken Lyons: fairdirector@tnjsf.org, and mention FAVR in the subject line.

Rationale

Those who have worked with them know that the ISEF forms can be challenging. ISEF has done a good job of setting up a set of forms that are flexible enough to deal with the very wide range of projects that are submitted to ISEF every year. That very flexibility, though, makes filling out those forms a complex exercise. Even for simple projects (or sometimes, especially for simple projects!) they can appear daunting. In setting up the FAVR system, we have endeavored to provide web-based forms, with extensive help and validation, designed to eliminate the most common types of errors, as well as removing the repetitive entries required of teachers, sponsosrs, and mentors.

Tutorial

If you want, you can enable a sidebar tutorial which will pop up in a window which you can place next to this one to guide you through the process.

Configurability

There are a few areas where the forms can be configured for a given fair.

Team projects can be restricted to 2 or 3 students (or not accepted at all). The default is to allow 3 students.
Special requirements can be indicated (as text) for human or vertebrate projects. Use this if you have rules that are MORE restrictive than the ISEF rules.
Additional forms can be added for a given fair. For the TNJSF, we include a form similar to Form 2, as well as a form
In place of the Form 1C, we require a Mentor Report from ALL mentors and supervisors. The answers will be used to produce the 1C tequired by ISEF, but it is our experience that having the feedback from the mentors is an important adjunct to project evaluation.
The fair can specify an Entry Form if desired, just by giving us a URL on your system.
Any of the forms above can be removed or altered for a given fair, if requested.
On a limited basis, we can use customized forms (if you provide them as fillable PDF forms) if you use special forms of some other sorts for your fair.
The size of the various fields in the research plan can be adjusted as desired. The defaults set up a roughly 4-page research plan, which we find is more than adequate.
Other fairs havwe two options for automation between their system and FAVR (see below).

Usage outside the US

In general, the FAVR web forms are designed to accept Unicode characters (i.e. characters with diacritical marks or other non-Latin characters). The one exception is that the email address of a user (and therefore all email fields, including alternate emails) must be entered in latin characters. We use the email strings as identifiers in FAVR, and if we allow Unicode characters in them (which I note is technically OK), the ambiguities in Unicode character sequences would interfere with proper matching. Hence we prevent Unicode characters in email fields.

TEMPORARY RESTRICTION: For now the use of unicode characters is restricted, since we have found it causes problems in filling out the PDF forms. We hope to lift this restriction in the relatively near future.

Access

We use a password-free registration, based on an email handshake. Anybody with an email can register and access the system. To register, go to https://tnjsf.org/favr/start.html. The procedures differ a bit for students and adults.

a student is required to specify their school. There is a choice for home-schooled students and for students enrolled FULL TIME in an online school.
an adult is required to identify as teacher, professional scientist or engineer, grad student, or parent (in that order). Regardless of this identification, any adult is allowed to occupy any adult role on a project: parent, sponsor, mentor, supervisor, or IRB member (inn some cases multiple roles are allowed--like parent and sponsor).
- A teacher is required to specify their school affiliation.
Any registration can show alternate email addresses. Since individuals are identified by email on this system, any email address that is registered and verified may be used for that identification (e.g. for team member, parent, sponsor, etc). Note, however, that a given email address can be associated with either student or adult roles, NOT BOTH.
An alternate email address can be used for logging in, but the account shown at the top of the page will be the preferred email. If you have alternate email addresses, you will see a link to change the preferred one on your account update page.

Using the system

The steps are simple:

A student gains access, using a verified email address, and fills out the forms defining a project. At the start, all the forms are available for data entry by the student.
When the student is finished, they can send requests to their sponsor, mentor, and/or parent. Note that these requests will depend on the email addresses the student provides. Those notifications will fail if the emails are inaccurate. Students have to use care in entering them, We have no way to verify the email addresses entered.
When an adult gains access, they will see a list of the projects and forms that need verification and signing. (If there are multiple projects, you will see a list). Again, these linkages are controlled by the email addresses the students provide.
The adults will be able to modify and/or sign the forms via the system. Or, if preferred, they can download the pdfs and sign them independently. ISEF is now accepting digital signatures, so we encourage the use of those rather than manual signatures, but the FAVR system itself doesn't impose a requirement. Note that as part of this update process, they will also provide the "official" copy of their names, which will then propagate to other forms in the system (keyed by email address). They will also be able to register a "preferred" email address, which will be linked to their account after verification.
If the adults have sisgned the forms on the FAVR system, then the fields that are supposed to be validated by the mentor or sponsor will no longer be editable by the student, unless the forms are first "un-signed".
Regardless of whether the forms are signed on the system or downloaded for independent processing, the teachers will be able to download XML files detailing the contents of the forms for use in other electronic systems. For now this is not provided as a formal "web-service" API, but that is our eventual plan.
All signers (students, parents, sponsors, mentors) will be able to download copies of the forms, either with FAVR signatures or ready for Adobe digital signatures.
To make things easier for teachers, their account will include the information on contact, background, and training. Hence, those items don't have to be entered separately on each form. They will be included automatically. There will also be a way to enter a special version for a given project (for example, if the generic background statement isn't relevant to a given project.)

Interface with other Systems

There is an JSON API that can be used to transfer projects entered on your system, be it zFairs or some other, into the FAVoR system for further processing. We plan to add other capabilities on this interface over time.

If your fair uses zFairs, it is possible to configure the fair to have its projects downloadeed to FAVoR automatically. This is set up through the configuration page (see below).

Configuration

Any fair can be added to the list of fairs in the system, but if the fair administrative personnel wish to use the SRC report screens, one person must be named as the administrator. That is done by contacting the FAVoR administrator (fairdirector@tnjsf.org). Multiple individuals can be named for a single fair if desired. Once the administrator(s) are defined, any of them can visit the configuration page to define the other parameters required. In order to use the API (above), you must indicate that on the configuration page, and then it will show you the fairID and fairToken values for your fair. These values should be kept private.

To configure the zFairs download, it is necessary to give us the zFairs administrative username and password, since zFairs allows only the admin account to use their JSON interface. If they defined an "integration admin" then we could use that, but for now that isn't available. The parameters will be protected on our site from anybody without root permission, and we will not use them for anything except accessing the reports needed to perform the download. (We plan to set up an Excel upload to utilize one of the zFairs reports, but that would be a manual interface, not an automated one.)