Science Fair Information

The Science Fair will take place April 21st; 1:45 p.m.-2:45p.m.

Information Packet

Parents and Students,

We are very excited about our upcoming Science Fair. Projects can be done by individual students, groups of students or an entire classroom.

Our hope is that everyone will become excited about science and have a great time.

If you have any questions, please contact Brenda Ellis at Brenda.ce{at}gmail{dot}com or 760-4397, and she will try to answer any questions you may have.

Rules and Information

The K-5 Science Fair will be held on Thursday, April 21st, 2011, from 1:45 p.m. until 2:45 p.m. Each student will be responsible for setting up and taking down their project. Tables will be set up in the gym for projects to be displayed.

Any students in grades Kindergarten through fifth are eligible to enter the Science Fair.

Individual, group, and classroom projects will be accepted. You may do a project with individuals not in your grade level.

Thomas Edison will provide electrical outlets for projects, but will not provide running water, drainage or facilities for gas or compressed air. Dangerous chemicals, open flames and explosives may not be exhibited. All projects must be durable and safe. Any project deemed to be unsafe or inhumane in any way will not be displayed at the Science Fair. Live animals cannot be exhibited, but photographs are acceptable.

The project must clearly be the student’s own effort. If adult support is given, it should be acknowledged on the display.

Projects should follow the scientific method. Journals are encouraged.

One Summary of Project form must be completed and returned to your teacher by Thursday, April 14.

The second Summary of Project form must be prominently displayed with their project. Printable forms can be sent via email.

Scientific Method

There is no one scientific method, but in general it is usually written as a number of steps:

Come up with a question about the world. All scientific work begins with having a question to ask. Sometimes just coming up with the right question is the hardest part for a scientist. The question should be answerable by means of an experiment.

Create a hypothesis — one possible answer to the question. A hypothesis is a word meaning "An educated statement about how something works", and it should be able to be proven right or wrong. For example, a statement like "Blue is a better color than green" is not a scientific hypothesis. It cannot be proven right or wrong. "More people like the color blue than green" could be a scientific hypothesis, though, because one could ask many people whether they like blue more than green and come up with an answer one way or the other.

Design an experiment. If the hypothesis Is truly scientific, it should not be hard to design an experiment to test it. An experiment should be able to tell the scientist if the hypothesis is wrong; it may not tell him or her if the hypothesis is right. In the example above, an experiment might involve asking many people what their favorite colors are. Making an experiment can be very difficult though. What if the key question to ask people is not what colors they like, but what colors they dislike? How many people need to be asked? Are there ways of asking the question that could change the result in ways that were not expected? These are all the types of questions that scientists have to ask, before they make an experiment and do it. Usually scientists want to test only one thing at a time. To do this, they try to make every part of an experiment the same for every-thing, except for the thing they want to test.

Experiment and collect the data. Here the scientist tries to run the experiment they have designed before. Sometimes the scientist gets new ideas as the experiment is going on. Sometimes it is difficult to know when an experiment is finally over. Sometimes experimenting will be very difficult. Some scientists spend most of their lives learning how to do good experiments. Draw conclusions from the experiment. Sometimes results are not easy to understand. Sometimes the experiments themselves open up new questions. Sometimes results from an experiment can mean many different things.

These steps are from: here