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Science
Fair Guidelines
Steps to a successful science fair project:
1. Choose a topic: You could look through some books on science projects, or
look at the web sites listed at the end of these guidelines. Or, if you’re
really ambitious, you could come up with your own idea for an experiment. Choose
a topic that sparks your interest. Most scientists spend their careers working
on something they find especially fun or interesting.
2. Note what the hypothesis or the question is for your experiment. Every experiment
has some motivation, some reason for doing it. Before you design the details
of your experiment, make sure you have noted what question you are trying to
answer, or what hypothesis you are trying to test. For instance, the experiment
might try to answer the question “What will happen when I leave bread out
in a wet place for 3 weeks, compared to a dry place?” On the other hand,
you might not just be trying to answer a question; you might actually have your
own guess, or hypothesis, as to how the experiment will turn out. An hypothesis
is something like “Bread will get moldier when left in a damp place for
3 weeks than when left in a dry place.” Whether your motivation is a question
or an hypothesis, you should make sure you understand it before you begin your
experiment.
3. Check if your teacher approves of your project idea and question before going
on. Your teacher may have some suggestions or ideas, or he/she may tell you that
your idea is not entirely appropriate. Ultimately, it’s in your best interests
to make sure that you are on the right track.
4. Design the experiment, with proper controls. Come up with a precise experimental
procedure that you think will answer your question or test your hypothesis. If
you got your project idea from a book or a web site, this may be simply a matter
of adapting the experiment to your particular interests and resources. If the
experiment is your own idea, you will need to come up with the entire experimental
procedure yourself (get help from your teacher if you need it). Controls: Make
sure your experiment has proper “controls”, if need be. For example,
say you want to test the hypothesis that sugar makes people energetic. So you
feed someone lots of sugar day after day, and take measurements of their energy
levels. But this is not enough. You also need to feed this person a diet with
less sugar for the same period of time, so you can see how that affects them
as well. This is called a control, and prevents you from making silly mistakes.
Another example would be the hypothesis that bread gets moldier if it is wet.
Don’t just put a piece of bread in a humid or moist environment for 3 weeks
and note that it got really moldy. You also need to put an identical (or as identical
as possible) piece of bread out (the control) in a dry environment, so you can
compare the two cases. The more different controls you have for different cases,
the more meaningful your results will be. Relevance: Make sure your experiment
is relevant to your question or hypothesis. Please AVOID projects that lack relevance.
For example, do not build a volcano based on baking soda and vinegar if your
motivation is to answer questions about volcanoes. Real volcanoes do not use
baking soda and vinegar, so this experiment has nothing whatsoever to do with
your motivation for doing it. It might be relevant to some other motivation,
say an hypothesis or question about mixing baking soda and vinegar, but in that
case, the pretend “volcano” is irrelevant and should be omitted.
5. Collect your equipment. From here on, you may need help from your parents.
Collect all the equipment you will need for the experiment. This will include
a poster for your display, and some notepaper for taking notes during the experiment.
6. Do the experiment, taking complete notes. Perform the experiment. This might
take minutes, hours, days or even weeks depending on your project. Make sure
you take complete notes of all your observations. If you see anything interesting,
write it down in your notes immediately, or you might end up forgetting about
it. If you need to take measurements, make sure they are accurate and consistent
throughout the experiment. Record everything of importance in your note pad.
7. Review the results and draw conclusions. When the experiment is done, decide
whether your hypothesis turned out to be correct, or whether your question was
answered to your satisfaction. Please DO NOT pretend that the experiment was
more successful than it really was. The mark of a real scientist is the ability
to be completely honest and state when something did not really go as planned.
Make notes on what you would do differently if you did the experiment again.
This might include things that would better test your hypothesis (or answer your
question), or it might include things that would test a new hypothesis or question
that came up during the experiment. For some experiments, it may be possible
to actually go back and do the experiment again, but for more lengthy experiments,
you will have to settle for making note of the new experiment as “future
work”.
8. Write a report. Write a written report on the experiment. This need not be
too lengthy. Do not put anything in the report that you do not understand. For
instance, do not blindly copy a complicated scientific explanation from a book.
The report should simply be your explanation of what you did, and what you think
of the results. There are numerous ways you could organize it, but here is one
suggestion: (1) Question or Hypothesis: describe your motivation for doing the
experiment: what question you wanted answered, or what guess (hypothesis) you
made about how it was going to turn out, (2) Equipment: describe the equipment
used in the experiment, (3) Procedure: explain exactly how you did the experiment,
(4) Observations: give all your observations that you think are important. You
could show this as a graph or table, if you like, or just list the data, depending
on the experiment. Be absolutely honest! (5) Conclusions: state whether the question
was answered, or whether the hypot#€hesis was shown to be true. Be absolutely
honest! Give whatever further ideas or thoughts you might have about the experiment.
If there is anything you would do for a second experiment, list it as future
work.
9. Prepare your display: Prepare a display of your experimental apparatus, along
with a poster that summarizes the experiment. The poster is like a mini-version
of your report. You might include a graph or chart of your data, or some photographs
of the experiment in progress, or whatever you feel shows in a concise and simple
way what the experiment was all about. The hypothesis or question should be stated
on the poster, the most important data shown, and your main conclusion stated.
The poster, the experimental setup and the report will be displayed together
at the school and judged.
Judging
Your final project (poster, report and experimental setup) will be given three
different scores, based on three independent criteria:
1. Method: Did you properly state your motivation? Does your experiment properly
address your motivation (the question or hypothesis)? Did you properly carry
out the experiment as you described it? Did you make accurate and consistent
observations throughout the experiment? Did you include proper controls? Do your
conclusions follow logically from what happened in the experiment?
2. Presentation: Did you present the material in a pleasing and artistic fashion?
Is it well organized and easy to follow? Did you include all the experimental
apparatus (as much as is practical) in the display? Does the entire display show
that you took time and effort in putting it together?
3. Learning Value: How valuable was the project as a learning experience? If
you choose an interesting topic that teaches you new things, expect a high score
in this category. If the experiment was trivial, perhaps something you have already
done in school many times before, then the learning value is not great, even
if the display looks fantastic and the scientific method is beyond reproach.
The standards for judging will vary appropriately with the grade level of the
student. Your final score will be an average of the above three scores. Good
Luck!
Internet Resources
For ideas, you can ask your teachers and parents, and look at any science books
that you can find at school, home or at the library. You can also look at the
following web sites on the Internet:
http://www.scifair.org/
http://www.eduzone.com/tips/science/showtip3.htm
http://www.isd77.k12.mn.us/resources/cf/welcome.html
http://www.nyelabs.com/ (Choose “Home
Demos”)
http://www.ipl.org/youth/projectguide/
http://arginine.umdnj.edu/~swartz/scifair.html
http://physics.usc.edu/%7Egould/ScienceFairs/
http://www.yesmag.bc.ca/projects/projects.html
http://www.wppl.org/youth/sci_proj.htm
These are just some of the sites on the web with science fair ideas. Follow the
links on these pages, or search for keywords like “science fair”, to
find lots more pages on science projects of all types!
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