> Parental "help", e.g. doing most or all of the work for a science fair entry, is an open secret among Asian communities.
This has been a meme/running gag in countless sitcoms and Sunday morning newspaper comic strips for as long as I can remember. Not the Asian community part, just the 'parents actually doing the work' part. The joke is typically about overly competitive middle class suburban fathers juxtaposed against their children who have better things to do than care about dorky school projects.
The Cub Scout Pinewood Derby that I saw -- in which the kid is to carve a model car out of a block of wood at home, to race at an event -- they had wisely issued extra kits ahead of time, for those parents who would get a little too enthusiastic about helping Junior, and had separate races among the parents' cars.
Of course, the stakes were much smaller than an award or school admission that potentially makes/breaks your child's brilliant future career.
I had the same thought. :) I don't know what they're doing now. (I saw it when my mom led a Cub Scout pack, decades ago.)
If you wanted to organize some competitions in your city, the track I saw would be easy to build. You might want to design it to break down for storage in someone's garage, and to fit in the back of a couple SUVs. Maybe get city approval to host events as a block party or at a park. Or pre-arrange to donate it to a parish that hosts Scouts and has room to store it and occasionally set it up in their school gym or coffee&donuts hall.
Today, you also have more RC vehicle competitions, and (over-media-ified) generations of battling homebrew robots.
This has been a meme/running gag in countless sitcoms and Sunday morning newspaper comic strips for as long as I can remember. Not the Asian community part, just the 'parents actually doing the work' part. The joke is typically about overly competitive middle class suburban fathers juxtaposed against their children who have better things to do than care about dorky school projects.