Successful Science Fair Projects (continued)

Let your teacher or science fair coordinator know what your question is and how you plan to go about testing it. They will likely have some good suggestions to save you lots of time and trouble. Once you have their go-ahead, then make a list of your materials, gather them up and GET STARTED! If you are really doing science, you will probably find that some things don't go quite as you had predicted they would. You will have to modify your research methods or even your original question. You may have to add more materials to your list. My students often get discouraged by this, but actually it is a good thing. This is how science really works!

Keep good notes of the things you have tried and plan to include even the "didn't-works" and "mess-ups" in your project report. Be sure to try your experiment several times to be sure you have enough data to make a logical conclusion. If you tell me that one brand of cereal gets soggier in milk but you've only tried each cereal in one cup of milk, I would suspect that maybe it was a fluke; you need lots of "trials" (generally at least 3; the more, the better) for believable data. Remember, too, that you want to keep all of the experimental factors (variables) the same except the one you are testing. In the cereal experiment, it wouldn't be fair to all of the cereals if you left one brand in milk for one minute and tried the others after two minutes or something like that. Again, GET STARTED EARLY on carrying out your project. You can't still be doing the experiment the day before the project is due and expect to have a first-class write-up! 

In science fair projects as in life, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Plan to take pictures of the materials you used and of the experiment as it is being carried out. If you get started early, you will have time to have the pictures developed and include them as part of your report. (Or if you are lucky and your school has cameras that will take pictures and put them right into the computer, you will have time to learn how to do that and print them out for your report.)

Results or Data

The results section is where you tell your reader the actual numbers (or other data) that you got as you were doing the experiment. (In the tennis ball experiment, this would be a table with the different brands of balls and the actual heights each of them bounced on each trial.) You might also include a graph, if your data lends itself to it. But you do not tell your interpretation of the data - that's for the last section.

Conclusion

In the conclusion you finally get to tell your readers what you found out from the experiment, or how you interpret your data. Students often like to use this section to expand upon how much they liked doing the experiment (and how wise the teacher was to require such a good assignment!) or how much they learned from it ... but really this section should be focused on what you learned about your original question and hypothesis. For example, DID cheaper cereals get soggier in milk faster?

The Display

Project displays tend to be another source of great frustration to students, teachers and parents ... but they don't have to be! Again, what you need to do is PLAN AHEAD and then THINK OF YOUR AUDIENCE. Remember that they weren't there when you did the experiment, so what seems obvious to you will not be obvious to them unless you make it extremely clear.