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It's time to start thinking about your science fair project! Girlstart.com has put together some ideas about what your project can be as well as suggestions on how to present your project. Your science fair project can be a lot of fun if you start early, plan ahead and stay organized!

What are some project ideas?

Now that it's time for your school's science fair, I bet you are worried about your project. It doesn't have to be a super fancy experiment that costs a lot of money. Your project can show why something happens or what causes it. There are many different projects to choose from!

A good way to find a project is to try to answer a question that you've noticed in your everyday life. There are a lot of things that we see everyday that we don't know how or why they work or why they happen. A lot of these problems are very interesting to people who see your project. Here are some examples of questions you can try to answer:

How do musical instruments work?
How strong is a toothpick?
What kind of light bulb produces the most light?
What is the structure of a snowflake?
Is there a difference between regular soap and antibacterial soap?
Do different plants use different amounts of water?
Do different fertilizers affect how plants grow?
How do modems work?
How do webpages work?
How are photos developed?
How do televisions work?
How does the sun work?

How do I get started?

The first thing you need to do is decide what your project is going to be. In this example, Sarah has noticed that when she listens to music during a movie that she can get excited or sad. But does that mean that music affects her heart rate? Sarah has found the problem she wants to answer for her science project - Does music affect heart rate?

Sarah now needs to learn more about heart rates to begin her project. She can talk to her science teacher first to make sure that she can do the experiment without any help from an adult or professional. She can visit the library to find books on what a normal heart rate is and how to measure it. She should write down the book titles and authors so she can use the information later on in her project.

Sarah has begun information gathering, which is very important before you start your project. Be sure to start as soon as possible and not wait until the last minute before the project is due. You need enough time to collect information about your project to make sure it's something you can do.

Now that Sarah has enough information to know that her project is doable, she begins to get down to business.

How do I do my experiment?

To present her project, Sarah must decide and write down the following:

Title of Project
Write a title that describes what you are investigating. Try to make it catchy!
Project Purpose
What is it that you want to find out? Write a sentence that explains what you are looking for.
Hypothesis
Your hypothesis is what you believe will happen when you run your experiment. Using Sarah's example, her hypothesis would be that music affects a person's heart rate. The hypothesis must be a statement and not a question.
Experiment Design
You have to write out step by step how you will test your hypothesis and how you will measure those changes. This is the guts of the science experiment that you are going to run. Don't forget about the scientific method! We'll talk more about your experiment design in a minute.
Get Materials and Equipment
Make sure you have everything you need to run your experiment and keep the list. In Sarah's example, she's going to need things like CD players, CDs, and headphones for her experiment.

When planning your experiment design, you have to have one thing that changes in your experiment in order for it to be a successful test. You need to remember that you have to have data to compare to in order to present your findings. What does that mean? Let's look at Sarah's experiment as an example.

Sarah has to keep a couple things in mind for her experiment about heart rate and music. She's going to need to find subjects to experiment on, such as her brother and her friends. She needs to know what their heart rate is before they listen to the music to compare to their heart rate after the music. For Sarah, the thing in her experiment that changes is the subject's heart rate while listening to music.

When Sarah begins, it's very important to make sure that the music is the only thing that changes in her experiment, so everything else must remain constant. All her subjects should listen to the same CD, sit in the same chair, and listen for the same amount of time. To really pump up her project, Sarah can have them listen to different styles of music (slow, techno, classical) to see how their heart rate changes.

Now that Sarah has her plan together, it's time to run the experiment. Sarah needs to set up her experiment by finding subjects and gathering the materials that she wrote down before. When running your experiment, you need to write down everything in your experiment that can be measurable. In Sarah's example, she needs to write down heart rates and the length of music for each subject she studies. Be sure to write stuff down even if it didn't work or didn't happen like you expected it to. Run the experiment several times (on more than one person if your experiment uses people) to make sure your results are accurate. Take pictures (if your subjects don't mind) to use in your presentation later.

Now it's time to collect your data and put it all together.

What do I do with my findings?

Sarah now has the heart rates of several subjects before and after they listen to music. She needs to present this in a way that is easy to understand. When you have numbers as a result from your experiment, charts and graphs are an excellent way to present your findings. The graphs can show how something changed in your experiment more effectively than just explaining it with words.

In addition to graphs and charts, write a summary of what happened with your experiment. What results did you get? Now it's time to write your conclusion. Using the data from your experiment, did you prove your hypothesis? It's okay if you didn't prove it. In your conclusion, you can say what you think the correct hypothesis would be, what you could do to make your experiment more successful, and what problems you had during your experiment.

How do I make a display?

Since you wrote everything down, make graphs, and took pictures, the display should be pretty easy. Keep in mind that when someone sees the display, they weren't there when you did the experiment so you have to show what happened as clearly as possible. Be sure to check out the rules and regulations of your school's science fair before you begin. (Display size, tri-fold, etc.)

Find a board for your display at office supply or craft stores. They come pre-folded and in different colors. Try to save the board so you can use again next year to save paper and money.

Type and print out everything that you wrote down before - your title, the problem, your hypothesis, your experiment design, your findings, and your conclusions. Make sure the type is big enough so that someone standing a few feet away can read it. Pictures and graphs make your display a lot more interesting so be sure to use them! Arrange the parts of your project in order so someone can follow what you did logically. Use colors creatively to grab attention. Good luck with your science project!