Middle School Science Experiments (Page 132)

The Wagon Wheel Effect

Science Fair Project Idea

Scientific Method

Have you ever seen a video where it looked like a car's wheels were spinning backward even though the car was driving forward? What about helicopter blades that looked like they were spinning very slowly, or even not moving at all? This illusion is called the "wagon wheel effect," named after old movies where it looked like wagon wheels were spinning backward. In this science project you will learn how the wagon wheel effect works and how you can film it yourself. Read more

The Wright Stuff: Using Kites to Study Aerodynamics

Science Fair Project Idea

Scientific Method

The Wright brothers used kites extensively to test their design ideas in the years leading up to their first successful airplane flight. With this science project, you'll learn about kite aerodynamics, and then come up with your own hypothesis about building or flying a kite. You can test your hypothesis two ways: with an online kite simulation program from NASA, and outdoors with the real thing! A great feature of this science project is that it has many possible variations, so you can decide… Read more

Think Like a Computer: Try Machine Learning

Science Fair Project Idea

Engineering Design Process

What should you eat for breakfast today? What should you wear to school? You make many decisions every day and consider lots of information when making those decisions. What if you could train a computer to make those decisions for you using artificial intelligence? In this project, you will not need to do any computer programming yourself, but you will do some simple math to show how a computer program called a neural network can learn to make decisions. If you want to try a version of the… Read more

Understanding the Emotions Hidden in Words with Sentiment Analysis

Science Fair Project Idea

Scientific Method

Sentiment analysis helps us understand the emotions behind text, such as whether people feel positive, negative, or neutral about a topic. It is useful for analyzing opinions on social media, reviews, or other text data. In this project, you will gather text data on a topic of your choice and use a sentiment analysis tool called VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner). Read more

Unleash the Power of a Pinwheel!

Science Fair Project Idea

Scientific Method

How do you feel when you ride your bike into a strong wind? Do your legs feel like lead? How about when the wind is at your back? Does that make you feel ready for the Tour de France? In this science fair project, you will investigate how wind-powered devices, like pinwheels, also react in different ways to the direction of the wind. Read more

Use a Drop of Water as Magnifying Glass

STEM Activity

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Are you ready to bend light, magnify letters, and have fun with drops of water—all while getting a glimpse into how lenses work? Lenses are the key components in eyeglasses, contact lenses, binoculars, telescopes, and magnifying glasses, just to name a few devices. With this activity, a homemade magnifying glass is only a drop away! Read more

Use Machine Learning to Identify Lyme Disease-Transmitting Ticks

Science Fair Project Idea

Engineering Design Process

Ticks are a growing public health concern in North America, as their populations and the diseases they carry, like Lyme disease, are on the rise. But how can we help people identify the ticks they encounter to reduce their risk of infection? With artificial intelligence! In this project, you will gather image data of three different tick species and use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to classify them. You will also apply image augmentation techniques to expand and enhance the dataset,… Read more

Use Sewable Circuits to Make Cool Costumes and Accessories

Science Fair Project Idea

Engineering Design Process

Do you want to add color-changing lights to your own clothing, costume, or fashion accessory? What about making the lights flash, or adding sensors to make them automatically react to things like temperature or motion? You can do it all with sewable circuits, also called wearable electronics, that let you sew circuit parts directly into fabric. You can make anything from a basic circuit with a few LEDs up to a programmable, Arduino-compatible circuit with multiple sensor inputs and multiple… Read more

Use the Sun's Energy to Heat Your Own Water

Science Fair Project Idea

Scientific Method

Isn't it nice to take a nice, hot shower or bath after a long day of playing outside? But have you really thought about how the hot water in your shower or bath gets hot? Sure, the water heater in your house gets it hot, but what makes the water heater work? Water heaters are powered by natural gas or electricity. But are there any other ways to heat water? What about using the Sun? In this science fair project, you'll give it a try by capturing energy from the Sun to heat water. Read more

Using a Laser Pointer to Measure the Data Track Spacing on CDs and DVDs

Science Fair Project Idea

Scientific Method

You've probably noticed the colorful patterns "reflecting" from the shiny surface of a CD disk. What you are seeing is actually diffraction of white light, and the rainbows of color are diffraction patterns. In this project you'll learn about how diffraction patterns are generated, and you'll find out how you can use a laser pointer and a protractor to measure the microscopic spacing of data tracks on a CD. Read more

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