‘Science’ star has advice for students
A gaggle of middle schoolers surrounded Robbie Barrat, stretching their arms up over each other to be called on for a question. Days before the new documentary “Science Fair” hits Bay Area theaters on Friday, Sept. 28, the film was screened for students in the Outer Sunset’s Holy Name School, and Barrat, one of the film’s exceedingly brilliant high school subjects, was crowded around as a sort of celebrity.
“This is the first time we’ve gone to a school to do this,” said the 19-year old. “You guys ask much better questions than the adults usually do.”
Barrat — who now lives in the South Bay but is from West Virginia — perhaps unsurprisingly built a rapport with the young fans. Among the film’s subjects who are competing at the International Science and Engineering Fair, the prestigious gathering of some 1,700 students from around the world conducting groundbreaking experiments, Barrat often appears onscreen as an outlier, and an entertainingly charismatic one.
“We were just walking around the fair talking to any-
body who we could talk to, and Robbie made us laugh,” said co-director Cristina Costantini (Darren Foster is the other director), referring to the initial scouting trip to the fair in 2016 in which they happened upon Barrat as an eventual subject. “And then we found out that he was failing out of math, but he was in a mathematics competition at the time.”
The irony stood separate from the rest of the film’s varied collection of young scientists — a Brazilian pair looking to alleviate the outbreak of the Zika virus, a young Muslim Bangladeshi American from South Dakota studying neuroscience and whose sponsor was the high school football coach. Entering the fair in the film, Barrat, whose project centered on machine learning, had been rejected from every college he applied to due to poor grades, having focused more on his own experiments: building a neural network to write raps based on Kanye West lyrics or a calculator that generated Shakespearean insults.
“You could be good at math and not do well at math class. Really,” Barrat told the students. “There’s sort of a disconnect between math and — well, actually I don’t know if I should say that.”
Behind Barrat, a Holy Name math teacher sternly agreed.
The dissonance, though, can be hard to ignore. Shut out of college, Barrat was nevertheless offered work in self-driving car technology in Silicon Valley. He now works in a research lab at Stanford University, where he has guest lectured — but the university has still not accepted him as a student.
Despite his dubious relationship with academics, Barrat encouraged the students to join science fair, at any level, and follow their passions.
“Don’t try to do a project that you think the judges will like,” Barrat told a student asking what to do for a science project. “Don’t try to do some cool project on curing cancer or something — unless you really love that. Just do a project on what you really love, and that way you’ll actually be able to work on it.”
In addition to his day job at Stanford, Barrat is working on how artificial intelligence can generate art; his AI-generated landscape painting was on the cover of a recent issue of Bloomberg Businessweek, and he is collaborating with French painter Ronan Barrot for a gallery show in Paris.
After the assembly, Costantini spoke separately about the film advocating for immigrants and women, as well as the value of science in a time when each is “under attack.”
The effects already seemed to be in play. A steady stream of students asked Barrat questions about how he modified his calculator or how to get into programming.
Of course, among the earnest scientific inquiry, the students didn’t forget certain priorities. In between answers about AI and neural networks, a student chimed in eagerly.
“Can I ask you a question? Do you play ‘Fortnight’?”