The Question
Your science fair project starts
with a question. This might be based on an observation you have made or a
particular topic that interests you. Think what you hope to discover during
your investigation, what question would you like to answer? Your question needs
to be about something you can measure and will typically start with words such
as what, when, where, how or why.
Background Research
Talk to your science teacher and use
resources such as books and the Internet to perform background research on your
question. Gathering information now will help prepare you for the next step in
the Scientific Method.
Just find, copy and paste the links of some research that talk about bouncing balls, rubber properties...
Hypothesis
Using your background research and
current knowledge, make an educated guess that answers your question. Your
hypothesis should be a simple statement that expresses what you think will
happen.
Write the hypothesis that your group did, if you disagreed explain why
Experiment
Create a step by step procedure and
conduct an experiment that tests your hypothesis. The experiment should be a fair
test that changes only one variable at a time while keeping everything else the
same. Repeat the experiment a number of times to ensure your original results
weren’t an accident.
What is a Variable?
A "variable" is a
word for a quantity or condition that can change. Variables can be
continuous or they can be discrete. Continuous variables can have many values
.
For example, time is continuous and can have many values. Plant growth,
amount of sunlight or amount of water flowing are all continuous
variables. Discrete variables are ones that have a few, distinct values.
Something can be either on or off, present or absent, or have only several
countable possibilities. A kitchen light can be on or off or a person may
have blue, brown, green or hazel eyes.
An independent variable is a
variable that you can control. One way to explain it to a child is that it
is the variable that the child can change during the experiment. For
example, in an experiment on the effect of light on plant growth, the
child can control how much light a plant receives. He can put one plant
near a window and another plant in a dark closet.
Dependent Variable
A dependent variable is the
variable that you observe and measure. You have no control over the
dependent variable; you want to observe what happens to the dependent
variable when you change the independent variable. For example, if the
child is testing the effects of light on plant growth, how much the plant
grows after some period of time would be the dependent variable. The child
can measure how much the plant in the closet grows relative to how much
the plant near the window grows.
Data
Collect data and record the progress
of your experiment. Document your results with detailed measurements,
descriptions and observations in the form of notes, journal entries, photos,
charts and graphs.
Insert some of these pictures (copy, paste in your computer and later upload in your post) be sure to include the chart pictures. You can built your graph in these website: http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/
Observations
Describe the observations you made
during your experiment. Include information that could have affected your
results such as errors, environmental factors and unexpected surprises.
Like in your poster.
Conclusions
Analyze the data you collected and
summarize your results in written form. Use your analysis to answer your
original question, do the results of your experiment support or oppose your
hypothesis?
Like in your poster.
Like in your poster.
Communication
Present your findings in an
appropriate form, whether it’s a final report for a scientific journal, a
poster for school or a display board for a science fair competition.
This post is your communication so you don't have to do any more.
No comments:
Post a Comment