Plan, analyse, and present your investigation
Your poster must fit on a single A1 sheet. A good poster is not one that crams in everything — it's one that a judge can read from a metre away and follow easily. White space is fine; crowding is not. If your content doesn't fit, the export will warn you. Here's how to make room, in order of what helps most:
1. Be concise in your writing. A poster is not a report. Aim for short, clear sentences and cut anything that repeats. Most first drafts can lose a third of their words without losing meaning. The Discussion is usually where the most can be trimmed.
2. Choose your figures ruthlessly. Include only the figures that genuinely add something. Two near-identical photos? Keep the better one. Each figure should earn its place by showing something words can't.
3. Use half-width figures to pair them up. In Method and Results you can set a figure to half-width so two sit side by side — useful for before/after shots. Just make sure the detail is still readable at that size.
4. Try a smaller text size. In the Style tab, "Small" fits noticeably more than "Large". If you're close to fitting, this often does it.
5. Trim what matters least. If you still don't fit, decide what a reader can do without — usually a long methodological aside or an extra future-direction. Keep your hypothesis, results, and main conclusion; those are non-negotiable.
594 × 841 mm
2 columns below title
841 × 594 mm
3 columns below title
Select your school to apply its official colour scheme to the poster header and section titles. Leave blank to use the theme colours above instead.
How the title block appears at the top of your poster.
How section headings (Introduction, Method, etc.) appear.
Adjust text size to balance your layout. If a column looks too empty, try larger text; if your content is getting cut off or crowded, try smaller. Changes show in the exported PDF.
Adds a small coloured chip in the header showing your scientific field.
Upload your school logo to appear in the header. PNG with transparent background works best.
Optional — a labelled diagram or photo that helps explain your topic.
Upload photos of your experimental setup
Add at least 3 numeric measurements. More replicates give more reliable statistics.
Sample standard deviation is used (divisor n−1), which is the appropriate formula when your measurements are a sample from a larger population of possible measurements.
Add data above and tap Calculate Statistics.
These are the numbers scientists use to describe a set of measurements. Here's what each one tells you about your data.
Average (mean)
Add up all your measurements, then divide by how many you have. It's the "typical" value. If your five trials were 18, 20, 21, 19 and 22, the average is 100 ÷ 5 = 20.
Median
The middle value when you line your measurements up from smallest to largest. Useful because one unusual result (say, a mistake) pulls the average around but barely moves the median.
Range
The smallest and largest values you recorded. A quick way to see how much your results varied.
Standard deviation (SD)
How spread out your measurements are around the average. A small SD means your trials agreed closely with each other — good repeatability. A large SD means they were all over the place, which is a sign something was hard to control. SD is in the same units as your measurement.
Standard error (SEM)
How confident you can be that your average is close to the "true" value you'd get if you could do endless trials. It gets smaller the more trials you do — which is exactly why doing more repeats makes your conclusion stronger.
Coefficient of variation (CV)
The standard deviation written as a percentage of the average. It lets you compare how variable two different things are even when they're measured on different scales. A CV of 5% is very consistent; 50% is highly variable.
Error bars
The little whiskers drawn on top of each bar or point in your chart. They show the spread (SD) or the precision (SEM). Here's the useful trick: if the error bars of two groups overlap a lot, you should be cautious about claiming the groups are really different — the difference might just be measurement noise. If they're clearly separate, your difference is more believable.
Why this matters: Reporting an average on its own hides how reliable it is. Showing the spread (SD), the precision (SEM) and error bars is how scientists are honest about how much to trust a result. A judge reading your poster will look for exactly this.
"Add to Poster" sends the chart to your Results tab as a figure (counts toward the 3-image limit).
Generate a short statistical summary in plain English and append it to your Results writing area. You can edit it after.
Line graph: Changes over time or continuous range
Example: Plant height measured every 2 days
Bar graph: Comparing different groups
Example: Final heights under different lights
Scatter plot: Looking for relationships between two variables
Example: Light intensity vs growth rate
See the Tools tab for free graph-making apps that produce cleaner results than spreadsheet defaults.
Upload photos of results, graphs, or charts
Harvard style lists your sources alphabetically by author's surname. The general pattern is: Author, Year, Title, where you found it, date you accessed it. Copy a pattern below and swap in your own details.
Website
Author or organisation, Year, Title of page, Website name, viewed DD Month YYYY, <URL>.
Bureau of Meteorology 2025, Climate data online, BoM, viewed 12 May 2026, <http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/data>.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia uses the page title as the author.
Wikipedia 2025, Air-free technique, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air-free_technique>.
Tip: Wikipedia is a good starting point to understand a topic, but for a science award try to find and cite the original source it's based on (often listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia page) rather than Wikipedia itself.
YouTube video
Channel or creator, Year, Title of video, online video, viewed DD Month YYYY, <URL>.
Veritasium 2023, Why does a flame need oxygen?, online video, viewed 1 June 2026, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxx>.
Book
Author surname, Initial Year, Title of book, Publisher, Place of publication.
Atkins, P 2018, Chemistry: a very short introduction, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Journal article
Author surname, Initial Year, 'Title of article', Journal name, volume(issue), page numbers.
Smith, J 2021, 'Combustion in low-pressure environments', Journal of Chemical Education, 98(4), pp. 1123–1130.
The Analysis tab in this builder makes bar, line, scatter, and pie charts — including bar charts with SD or SEM error bars when you compare groups. Charts can be added straight to your poster with one tap. Best choice if you want everything in one place. The tools below are alternatives if you want more advanced styling.
Genuinely the cleanest free chart maker around. Paste data in, click chart type, export as PNG. Designed by data journalists, so the defaults are professional.
If your data lives in a spreadsheet already, Sheets' chart tools are familiar and reliable. To export, take a screenshot or use File → Download → PDF on a single sheet. Bump the font sizes up before exporting — defaults are too small for an A1 poster.
For more sophisticated visualisations — animated bar charts, maps, scatter plots with categories. Free public tier. Take screenshots to embed in your poster.
Hand-drawn style diagrams. Brilliant for method diagrams, simple apparatus sketches, and flowcharts. Export as PNG with transparent background. The sketchy aesthetic looks intentional and approachable on a student poster.
Cleaner-looking flowcharts, network diagrams, and process maps. Great for showing experimental setup as a labelled diagram. Export PNG.
Specifically for biology — cells, organs, lab equipment, molecular diagrams. Free tier has limited exports but enough for one poster. The visual quality is publication-grade.
A free Photoshop alternative that runs in your browser. Use it to crop, adjust brightness, add arrows or labels to your setup photos, or remove backgrounds. Works on tablets reasonably well.
Free for students with a school email. Useful for adding text labels, arrows, infographic-style elements, and illustrations to support your figures. Don't use it to design your whole poster — use this builder for that and use Canva for individual elements.
Open-source desktop image editor. Heavier than Photopea but more capable for serious editing. Worth installing if you have a laptop and want to do significant work on photos.
Australian biodiversity records — plants, animals, fungi. Many photos are CC-licensed and perfect for ecology investigations. Always credit the photographer.
Public domain space, earth, and aviation imagery. Free to use without attribution required (though crediting NASA is polite).
Australia's national science agency image library. Free for educational use. Strong on agriculture, marine biology, astronomy, and engineering.
Massive library of CC-licensed images. Always click through to check the specific licence — most require attribution. Diagrams of scientific concepts are particularly useful here.
High-quality stock photos, free, no attribution required. Good for "context" images (a forest, a city, a lab). Less useful for specific scientific subjects.
Massive icon library. Free with attribution (or paid for unattributed use). Search "molecule", "beaker", "DNA", or any concept and you'll find dozens of options.
Google's free icon set. Clean, consistent, and free without attribution required. Download as PNG or SVG.
Free climate and weather data. Perfect for investigations involving temperature, rainfall, or seasonal patterns in Ballarat or anywhere else in Australia.
Demographics, health, environment, economy. Useful for any investigation involving population-level data.
Research datasets across many fields. More advanced than the others but valuable if you're doing data-heavy work.
If the built-in themes don't quite fit your topic, generate a custom palette here, then use those colours in your figures and graphs to keep everything visually consistent.
Start filling in the sections to see your poster preview here.
When your poster is ready, head back to the Info tab and click Export A1 PDF. The output is a true A1 PDF (594 × 841 mm) ready to print at any school or commercial printer.
Fill in sections to see your poster preview here.