3rd Grade Science Fair Projects and Ideas [sciencetechnology-center.blogspot.com]
Question by quincy: What science fair question would give me the higher mark? What science fair question is better? Please say what grade level you would give these. Test if changing the number of distracters will affect the ability of an observer to find the target during a visual search. Or, does gender affect colour preference? How do fears change with age? Should I investigate how food wrappings spoilage? Which one? Best answer for What science fair question would give me the higher mark?:
Answer by thinkingblade
Hmmm. In my opinion the most interesting of the topics is the first one: Test if changing the number of distractors will affect the ability of an observer to find the target during a visual search. That is an issue with alot of potential depth and applicability - ie, marketing, social interaction, safety (i.e. around an activity like driving), military, software usability, the list is long. It also has options around types of distractors (aural, visual, dynamic, static) as well as number in terms of affect as well as looking at potential cooresponding factors such as IQ (are higher IQ more easily distracted or less?) It also is something which you could reasonably construct pretty solids tests around to get real data and analyze it. When you ask about grade level I am assuming what grade level of education could be expected to tackle the problem. - In this case I would say that even a junior high schooler could take this problem and with some work put something really interesting together. I can absolutely tell you that it is a sophisticated enough question to have depth well into the PhD. level of education. Probably second, and a distant second would be investigate how food wrappings impact spoilage. To get an A there you would have to get into the actual biology of how food spoils, and what the wrappings do to counter it. A basic sort of project could be done with even grade schoolers, and probably into junior high, but I would think by the time someone got to high school chemistry it would be pretty mundane unless the worked very hard to make it interesting (radiative treatment of foods?). The 25 year old twinkie experiment was old even when I went to school. The last two questions I see as about the same and to be honest are a bit ho hum to me. Fundamentally, this is because it would be very difficult to get to a cause for difference, which just means you are reporting a phenomena without being able to create conditions under which it remains true. For example - in the gender color difference - lets assume based on using survey style analysis you find that girls prefer pink and boys prefer blue. Why would that be? Is it cultural? Meaning that it is only true in European/Western cultures but not Asian? Is it conditional? Meaning boys like to wear blue but prefer seeing girls in pink, and girls like wearing pink but seeing boys in blue? Is it actually genetic - meaning that the preference retains between women and men everywhere, but it doesn't extend to lesbians with something more of a male "outlook"? Or is it hormonally driven so that if you were, as a man, ingesting estrogen you would change your preference? Essentially, the question itself doesn't do anything for the person grading the test other than to say - men and women are different in this way. The follow on questions all start getting pretty hard - probably harder than is reasonable for a science fair. So, for someone really young and learning the basics about how to gather data through a survey and learning some basic statistics (averages, standard deviations, box and wisker plots, etc) it makes a reasonable middle school project to identify the difference. To do something more than anecdotes of WHY there are differences is just really, really hard. So if a more advanced student - high schooler for example - were to do this, I would expect they would need to actually do some more advanced statistics to at least provide some coorelation factors besides the primary they are testing (i.e. gender, age, home cultural background, Meyers Briggs personality type indicator, or such) to give the problem some depth they can actually get at. Thinkingblade
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3rd grade science fair projects are a lot of fun because at this age children are eager to explore the world around them and find out how things work. They are constantly wanting to know the answer to the question "What happens if I do this..." and therefore they will likely come up with many different experiments they'd like to try. It may be difficult to decide on just one!
At this age they have a short attention span though, so the projects must be simple, fun and fairly short. There are many, many different project ideas for this age group such as; do all the children in their class have the same size hands and the same size feet as each other? They can research this by tracing the other children's hands and feet on a piece of paper and comparing them to each other.
They could do a test to see if waterproof mascara is really waterproof. To do this you would need a couple brands of waterproof mascara, a piece of paper and some water. Simply put the masca ra onto a sheet of paper and rinse it under some water to see what happens.
Another fun 3rd grade science project would be to see if raw eggs and hard boiled eggs spin the same number of times. Obviously they would need an adult's help with this one in order to cook the eggs, and then they simply need to spin each egg and record the results. There are lots of great 3rd grade science projects out there; it's just a matter of finding one that interests them.
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