Abstract
Many medicines come in bottles with special child-proof caps so that small children can't accidentally open the bottle and eat the pills. To a small child who can't read the label, the pills might look just like candy. What cues do we use to tell the difference between medicine and candy? At what age can we tell them apart? This project can show you how to find out.Objective
The goal of this project is to determine if young children are able to tell the difference between candy and medicine.
Introduction
Many medicines are in the form of colorful tablets, pills, or even chewable gels. To a small child (or perhaps even an adult), they might appear like candy, especially out of the medicine bottle. What cues do we use to tell the difference between medicine and candy? Can small children tell them apart?
Keeping medicine out of reach of small children is one way to protect them from a potential hazard. Here are some additional tips on poison prevention related to medicine and small children from the Oklahoma Poison Control Center (Staff, 2005):
To do this project, you will have to survey a random sample of small children to see if they can tell the difference between selected medicines and candies. You will need to have written permission from the children's parents before conducting the study. The Experimental Procedure section explains how to construct the survey. The Science Buddies resource, How Many Survey Participants Do I Need?, will show you how to figure out how many respondents you need to recruit in order to achieve your desired level of confidence that your results are representative of the total population.
Terms, Concepts and Questions to Start Background Research
To do this project, you should do research that enables you to understand the following terms and concepts:
Questions
Bibliography
Materials and Equipment
To do this experiment you will need the following materials and equipment:
Experimental Procedure
Note: There are special considerations when designing an experiment involving human subjects. For an experiment such as this, which involves children, parental consent must be obtained for all participants prior to beginning the experiment. In addition, the experimental design must be approved by the fair's scientific review committee (SRC) prior to the commencement of experiments or surveys. Please refer to the ISEF rules for additional important requirements for studies involving human subjects: http://www.sciserv.org/isef/document/.
Variations
Credits
Andrew Olson, Ph.D., Science Buddies
Sources
This project is based on:
Last edit date: 2006-09-06 17:08:26
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