Grade 7 Class Room 27 at 104 W. Dorothy Lane, Kettering, OH 45429 US - Science Fair Packet

 

 

 

 

The scientific method starts when you ask a question about something that you observe: How, What, When, Who, Which, Why, or Where?

And, in order for the scientific method to answer the question it must be about something that you can measure, preferably with a number. We call this a testable question.

Go to www.sciencebuddies.org to help you pick a topic area. Go to the Topic Selection Wizard.

You may also want to start practicing your experiment to make sure it will work and if it doesn’t then you still have time to pick a new question or design a new experiment.

***Topic must be approved science teacher to proceed.

Rather than starting from scratch in putting together a plan for answering your question, you want to be a savvy scientist using library and Internet research to help you find the best way to do things and insure that you don't repeat mistakes from the past.

 

Reviewing books and websites is done to demonstrate that you understand your project area. It is done to justify and validate what you have said in the “because” part of your hypothesis

The hypothesis is an “If…then…because” statement. It is a paragraph that sets up the reason for the project. 

You must state your hypothesis in a way that you can easily measure, and of course, your hypothesis should be constructed in a way to help you answer your original question.

A hypothesis is an educated guess about how things work:
"If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen” because…

 

This portion is the actual “doing the science”. It is the hands-on part that you should have fun doing. 

Your experiment tests whether your hypothesis is true or false. It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. You conduct a fair test by making sure that you change only one factor at a time while keeping all other conditions the same.

You should repeat your tests at least three times to get three data points. More is better.

This is the detailed list of what materials you used in your experiment/project and the step-by-step details of what you did. The idea of listing the materials and procedure is so the judge/teacher can determine whether you designed a good experiment. It is also written so that people who are interested in what you learned can repeat your experiment. 

3 Important Questions:

1. Will the procedure you are following give you a result that you can measure (ruler, scale, thermometer, stop watch) or observe (and record with a camera, camcorder)?

2. Will the measurement or observation help you prove (or disprove) the “because” part of your hypothesis?

3. Have you given enough detail that a student from another school could read your materials/procedure section and then duplicate the results?

If the answer to these questions is yes then you have a good start.

 

Keep a LOG BOOK of your observations and data collection. This can be done in a small notebook or on loose leaf paper. Keep your logbook in your Science Fair Folder.

Take the data you collected in your log book and organize it into charts, graphs, or spreadsheets etc. The way you organize and analyze your data should help you prove (or disprove) your hypothesis and lead to the answer of your question.

 

The conclusion and next steps come from the analysis of the data and are the key things that you learned from the experiment. The conclusion should somehow prove or disprove the hypothesis and answer your initial question. It can also say what more needs to be done to better answer your questions. 

It is okay if your hypothesis was proved wrong. This happens to scientists all the time. It just means they try again after making some changes.

 

To complete your science fair project you will communicate your results to others in a final report and a display board. Professional scientists do almost exactly the same thing by publishing their final report in a scientific journal or by presenting their results on a poster at a meeting. See display board sample on the next page.

 

Scientists use an experiment to search for cause and effect relationships in nature. In other words, they design an experiment so that changes to one item cause something else to vary in a predictable way.

These changing quantities are called variables. A variable is any factor, trait, or condition that can exist in differing amounts or types. An experiment usually has three kinds of variables: independent, dependent, and controlled.

The independent variable is the one that is changed by the scientist. To insure a fair test, a good experiment has only one independent variable. As the scientist changes the independent variable, he or she observes what happens.

The scientist focuses his or her observations on the dependent variable to see how it responds to the change made to the independent variable. The new value of the dependent variable is caused by and depends on the value of the independent variable.

For example, if you open a faucet (the independent variable), the quantity of water flowing (dependent variable) changes in response--you observe that the water flow increases. The number of dependent variables in an experiment varies, but there is often more than one.

Experiments also have controlled variables. Controlled variables are quantities that a scientist wants to remain constant, and he must observe them as carefully as the dependent variables. For example, if we want to measure how much water flow increases when we open a faucet, it is important to make sure that the water pressure (the controlled variable) is held constant. That's because both the water pressure and the opening of a faucet have an impact on how much water flows. If we change both of them at the same time, we can't be sure how much of the change in water flow is because of the faucet opening and how much because of the water pressure. In other words, it would not be a fair test. Most experiments have more than one controlled variable. Some people refer to controlled variables as "constant variables."

In a good experiment, the scientist must be able to measure the values for each variable. Weight or mass is an example of a variable that is very easy to measure. However, imagine trying to do an experiment where one of the variables is love. There is no such thing as a "love-meter." You might have a belief that someone is in love, but you cannot really be sure, and you would probably have friends that don't agree with you. So, love is not measurable in a scientific sense; therefore, it would be a poor variable to use in an experiment.