I need help starting science project on bacteria

[matthew1]

I am a fifth grader wanting to determine if the school nurses with their increased exposure to illness will have more bacteria accumulation on their keyboards than the students in their classrooms on their key boards. I understand many infections in hospitals are from the health care workers. How do I go about doing this. I have permission from my school and the school nurses. I just need help please with the research support and if I need a third control group...
New, we have never done the science fair and I am in the 5th grade!!!!!!!!!! Please help me if you can make sense of this. Matt

[donnahardy2]

Hi Matt,

Welcome to science buddies. You have picked a very interesting and challenging project. First you should read the basic information about working with microorganisms, especially the safety information. You will need to be careful when working with live microorganisms so your project will be safe. Please read the following and let us know if you have any questions about the information.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... Agar.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... tion.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ates.shtml

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... fety.shtml

For your project, you first need to read as much information about the topic as possible and think of a question that you can answer with an experiment. You have already thought about that, and I think you want to compare numbers of bacteria on the nurses’ keyboards compared to students. But do read as much as you can before you go to the next step. Can you state your problem in the form of a question?

Next, you need to make a list of the items you will need for your project. This will help you plan the project. Do you know where to get the Petri dishes and agar for growing the bacteria? I’m hoping you have someone who can help you get the materials.

It’s good you are thinking about controls. In experiments like this, you will need a positive control and a negative control. The positive control will be an agar plate (or whatever you use to grow the bacteria) that contains growing bacteria. The negative control is a sterile plate that shows that the bacteria on the test plates came from your sample and was not due to contaminated agar.

I hope this helps you get started. Please do let us know if you need more information.

Donna Hardy

[michellebayefsky]

Dear Matt,

In terms of the specifics, think about how long you want to run your experiment for. In order to quantify your results, compare the number of square centimeters in the petri dishes covered by bacteria. The following link may be helpful.

http://www.sciencecompany.com/sci-exper/petridishes.htm

Good luck!

Michelle