One of the rites of passage for most students is participating in the science fair. Who hasn’t seen a sitcom episode in which a student struggles to come up with a good science fair project before desperately attempting to make a vinegar and baking soda volcano as a last-minute substitute? The plot is so common that it has its own page on the TV Tropes website: “A school event in which students (usually the entire class) create science-related projects and exhibit them to parents and faculty. Usually, a competition is involved where the creator of the best project is presented with an award. Inevitably, someone will build a volcano, which tends to erupt and make a mess of the auditorium, or a model of the solar system.”
But science fairs are also a common experience for real-life students, too. In this article, we’ll take a look at some tips and tricks to help you create a great science fair project or any other homework assignment given during STEM classes.
10 Tips to Do Science Fair Projects Effectively
So, where should you begin doing your science fair project? We asked assignment experts to share their thoughts and ideas to help you out immediately.
- Remember why you are participating in a science fair. Whether you volunteered for your school’s science fair or had the choice made for you when you were assigned to participate, there are many reasons to work on your project. Science fairs help you to challenge yourself, develop your appreciation of science, explore new technologies, create something useful, or even to win a prize. You’ll be proud when you put in the hard work!
- Consider the many types of science fairs. Science fairs aren’t all about baking soda and vinegar volcanoes. You can match your interests to a fair that’s the best fit for you. School science fairs tend to be general interest, but larger regional or national competitions might be specific to engineering, invention, computer science, etc.
- Familiarize yourself with the rules. Every science fair has specific rules for competitors. Make sure that you have familiarized yourself with all of the rules to ensure that your entry meets requirements and will qualify you for participation. After all, it wouldn’t be much fun to spend all of your time creating an amazing project only to be disqualified on a technicality.
- Choose a topic for your project. The hardest part of any science fair is choosing the right topic for your project. And, no, it shouldn’t be a volcano. There are thousands of potential topics to choose from, but one of the best ways to develop your project is to think about a question that can be answered. Pick something that you feel excited about and think will make for an interesting investigation. If a topic bores you, your audience won’t likely want to hear about it either.
- Be familiar with the scientific method. In developing your science fair project, you’ll want to follow the scientific method. You will need to identify a problem, conduct background research to familiarize yourself with what science has already done on the subject, and then develop a hypothesis—a guess—about the problem. Your project will demonstrate your experiment to help determine whether your guess is correct or not.
- Pay someone to do your project. If you are having trouble developing a good idea for your project and you are looking for people who could process your “pay someone to do my project for me” request, there are experts from MyAssignmentLab, for example, who will do your homework assignments online for money. “Will they build my volcano for me?” you might ask. While the experts who work on your project via an online service won’t be able to manufacture your project for you, you can get the help you need to develop a strong project of your own with a complete step by step guide.
- Develop your experimental design. The meat of a great science fair project is the experiment you’ll discuss and report on in your project. You’ll want to devote a great deal of your time to developing an airtight experiment that will help to prove whether your hypothesis is true or false. A good experimental design will clearly articulate how the hypothesis can be tested and offer an outline for what you will do during the experiment in order to record the right data to figure out whether your guess is right or wrong.
- Analyze your data. After you have collected your data, you will need to figure out what the data mean. This is the analysis part of creating your project. You will need to look at the data and figure out if it supports your hypothesis or refutes it. When you have finished looking at the data, you can draw some conclusions that you will present in your project.
- Present your project. One of the most fun parts of the science fair is creating your presentation. You’ll need to set up a display with a board in which you lay out your project and, if relevant, props and other visual aids to help explain your results. A typical display contains three panels on which you will present the title of your project, an introduction, a discussion of materials and methods, the results, your conclusions, and a list of references.
- Prepare something to say. Visitors to the science fair will want to hear from you, not just read your board. Be sure you have something to say about why you chose your topic, how you did your experiment, and what you think your conclusions mean and how they can be useful.
Wrapping Up
So, if you don’t have any idea how to do a science fair project in one day, you should follow the above mentioned guidelines designed to help STEM students in high school or college achieve excellent grades. Feel free to follow instructions and steps in doing your science fair project and you will succeed in your studies!
