Science Fair

First, start your curiosity engine. Start wondering about something you don’t quite understand, or think about an idea you might want to learn about better. Science is all about getting excited about what you DON’T know. ASK A QUESTION! Science is a tool for helping to answer questions.

What kind of questions should I ask? Not every question is going to be equally useful for a science project.

Less useful questions:

More useful questions:

Here are a few ideas on how to start thinking scientifically, so you can do a great science project.

• Be Analytic - break things down into parts 

• Be Systematic - make a plan, keep good notes, start with the simple

• Be Comprehensive - seek all evidence available

• Be Skeptical - assume as little as possible; question as much as possible!

Science requires us to collect “evidence,” which is anything that relates to your theory, anything that can help answer your question.

A hypothesis needs to make a prediction that you can test, which is kind of like making a bet on what you will find. Before collecting evidence you should think about what would count as support (or evidence for) or counter-evidence (evidence against) with respect to your ideas.

​The scientific method will be reflected in your project poster as you

• Describe your question

  • Show your background research

  • Explain who would be interested in this

• Come up with a hypothesis

  • Think about what predictions your hypothesis makes, and what will count as confirming or disconfirming evidence

• Come up with a methodology, or a way to collect evidence

• Display your evidence and analyze your results

• Draw conclusions, including a discussion of what your research means, and what future directions you might take

• Cite your sources

See section 7 for more info on a project appropriate to your grade level

Note: You can purchase a Tri-Fold Presentation board at Target or an office supply store to make the project poster:
Black Tri-Fold Presentation board | White Tri-Fold Presentation board | Cardboard Tri-Fold Presentation Board

By making clear / writing out what we’re going to do, BEFORE we start collecting evidence…

• We can keep to our plan

  • Avoids changing what we’re doing to find what we want (avoids errors / bias)

• We let others see clearly what we did

  • Increases confidence in our ideas

• Allows other to repeat what we did and check

  • Called “replication,” a key idea in science

Deciding how to convert an idea into a number is called quantification.

Not all variables need to be numbers. Here are some different ways of thinking about variables.

• Nominal (Names)

  • Descriptive - i.e. Street name someone lives on, hair color, etc.

• Dichotomous

  • Two choices - i.e. “Do you like mustard?” (yes/no questions)

• Ordinal

  • Can be ordered in a line - i.e. how much education someone has had (highschool, some college, university, graduate degree)

• Continuous

  • Can be measured in units - ​i.e. age, weight, time in seconds on a task, or Likert scales (on a scale from one to 10, how much do you like cheese).

Correlational method answers a question about whether two ideas are ASSOCIATED / CONNECTED. For example, if we wanted to know if there is a relationship between how much time someone spends exercising and how healthy they are, we might use correlational method to find out. Think about it this way: have you ever noticed that when you eat more fruits and vegetables, you feel better? Or, have you noticed that when you don't get enough sleep, you feel tired and cranky? That's what we mean by correlation!

Example questions for correlations: 
Are musicians better at math? 
Are kids who eat more vegetables actually healthier? 
Do older houses use more electricity?

Imagine we wanted to quantify how many vegetables kids eat. We might 

• Ask them: “How many vegetables do you eat a week?”

• Observe: Weight of the vegetables they ate off their plate.

• Get them to keep a journal of their food, and count up the times they mention a vegetable.

Imagine we wanted to quantify “health.” We might

• Ask them: “How healthy do you feel from 1-10…?”

• Observe: Measure how fast they can run a mile?

• Ask their parents how many times they’ve had to go to the doctor for being sick.

Experimental method is a way of finding out if something causes something else to happen. We call the thing we're changing (or manipulating) the "independent variable" and the thing we're measuring the "dependent variable". For example, if we wanted to know if playing music to house plants makes them grow more, we would use experimental method to find out.

Here's how it works: we could take two groups of plants. We could play one group of plants music and the other group none. We would keep everything else the same for both groups of plants, like the amount of sunlight they get and the kind of soil they're in.
After a week or so, we might measure how much the plants have grown. If the group of plants that got music grew more, then we might conclude that music helped the plants grow.

The important thing about experimental method is that we have to be careful to only change one thing at a time. That way, we can be sure that the change we see is because of the thing we're testing (the independent variable).

Analyzing results means looking at the data we collected during our experiment or study and trying to make sense of it. We want to see if the results support our hypothesis or not.

Here's how it works: after we conduct our experiment or study, we collect all the data we've gathered. This might be numbers, like how much the plants grew in each group, or it might be observations we've made, like how many times kids laughed during a funny movie.

Next, we organize our data in a way that makes sense. We might put all the numbers into a chart or graph, or we might make a list of our observations.

Then, we look at our data and see if we can find any patterns or trends. For example, if we conducted an experiment to see if exercising makes you stronger, we might look at our data and see that the group of people who exercised grew stronger muscles than the group that did not exercise.

Finally, we draw conclusions based on our data, and discuss what it all means. This can start by trying to make sense of what we've found. First we’ll report if the results support our hypothesis or not. Then we’ll move on to why the reader should care about what we found, and what it means in the big picture. Finally we’ll move on to possible future research directions.

• Discussion = What does this all mean?

  • Recap of everything that you found

  • State why you think this is important: who should know about this, how might it be helpful, etc.

  • Give plans for future directions, what other research might be needed

• Level 1 (suggested for K-1): 

  • Come up with question

  • Background research (try and answer question through reading / searching / etc.)

  • Optional: Come up with hypothesis (explanation)

  • Cite sources

• Level 2 (Suggested for grade 2+): 

  • Question

  • Background research

  • Hypothesis

  • Explain method (Imagine and explain what you MIGHT do to test it)

  • Cite your sources

• Level 3 (Suggested for grades 3+): 

  • Question

  • Background research

  • Hypothesis

  • Explain method (explain what you did)

  • Present results (as best you can)

  • Cite your sources

• Level 4 (Suggested for grades 4+): 

  • Question

  • Background research

  • Hypothesis

  • Explain method (explain exactly what you did)

  • Analyze results (include formal presentation, graphs, etc.)

  • Discuss significance, relevance

  • Cite your sources