Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi I am in 10th grade and not done science fair for a while, my project will involve having a baseline human conduct some task then have other subjects do the same thing but with different genres of music, I also thought about making a test for cognitive and another for hands on things, and see if they can focus better or not. Any help even in the slightest is great.

Hi bowlingMan2016,

This is a cool project idea! It sounds like you would be interested in doing something like this: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p003.shtml

One suggestion I have is that you focus on one type of test (cognitive or hands-on) if you are going to test several different types of music. That way, you can focus on getting a large sample size (lots of people) for your project. The above project is about doing a cognitive test. This one is more hands-on: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p030.shtml

I hope this helps you get started. Please post again (in this same thread) if you have more questions or need more guidance.

Best,
Heather

Thank you very much I will look in on both of those sources, and I will take your advice on doing one or the other.

Hello there,

Very cool project idea! One thing to think about is how you are going to define and measure "focus". If you are doing something cognitive-related, how are you going to compare your different human subjects in terms of how well they focus on their task? For example, let's say you give them a worksheet with 20 problems and give them a certain amount of time to work on it, would you define focus as how many problems they managed to finished in that amount of time, or how many problems they managed to get correct of the ones they did answer? Is your baseline for comparison going to be subjects doing the problems in complete silence? Who are you going to include in your subject pool? Are you going to look for people of the same gender or the same age group? This may be outside the scope of what you had wanted to test, but it may be really interesting to see if different types of music have different effects on males versus females, or on children versus adults!

Best of luck,
Connie