Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

My daughter is doing a project, including independent, dependent & contolled variables. The topic: What foods would 20 students (10 boys & 10 girls) at Jackson Middle School prefer: hamburger & fries, hot dogs & chips, mac & cheese or peanut butter & jelly sandwich.

Hi TFerguson1,

The Science Fair Project Guide at:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... l?From=tab

defines the basic concepts. Please consult there and let know if it answers your questions.

Re: your question on variables, there are two "variable" links located under Constructing a Hypothesis on the referenced page. And there are many other resources.

Just make a poll but i would not recomend this project

Thanks for your help.this topic was assigned by the teacher. Do you think I should request a topic change, because i'm not getting nowhere with this project. I need some serious help to get this project going. The date has changed to May 2

Hi TFerguson1,

Obviously Wheties820 thinks you should get a new project. Hopefully he/she will post the reasons.

Some reasons I can think are:

- if the topic is "what foods do middle school students prefer," the difficulty is the population. It would be enormously expensive depending on how you define the population: e.g., restricted to one county, state, or country. Also, the result becomes less meaningful with smaller populations.
- if you restrict the population to students at a particular school, the project becomes more manageable, but:
a. are the results meaningful?
b. one still has to deal with sample size to get acceptable accuracy. There are formulas here.

I agree with David; you might want to narrow the topic somewhat, both in terms of the study population and the actual study. 'Foods', after all, is a HUGE category. There is no possible way you can test all or even most foods.

I would suggest narrowing it down to something that interests you--for example, 'Do students at Middle School X prefer a higher fat/salt/sugar content in their food?' and then give students a blind taste-test of low-fat/sugar/salt items vs. normal fat/sugar/salt items. There are many projects that can be done along those lines.

In my mind, this wouldn't require a complete topic change, but you might want to check with the teacher and make sure. I think he/she may have just given you a broad topic and expected you to narrow the scope of the project on your own, but I don't know for sure.

I agree with MelissaB that you should be able to narrow the project. Since there seems to be a time crunch, you may want to limit the # of foods tested to allow time for the research and data collection.

I updated the topic, tell me what you think. thanks

TFerguson1 wrote:I updated the topic, tell me what you think. thanks

Hi TFerguson1,

I must be confused; I don't understand your post. What updates were done to the topic? What is the topic now?

I narrowed the to topic per one of the post suggestions..to 20 middle school students instead of just middle school students..also instead of foods, I chose 4 foods..

Hi TFerguson,
I think that is wise to narrow the range of possible food choices. If you can get more than 20 students, that's great. Don't limit yourself to any particular number of students if you are able to get more.

Currently, it is not clear what would be your independent and dependent variables for this experiment. It would help if you had a hypothesis - for example "As compared to middle school girls, middle school boys will prefer meat-based foods (hamburger or hotdog) over non-meat foods (mac & cheese or pb&j). In that case, you could say that the independent variable is the gender of the students, and the dependent variable is the ratio of boys or girls who prefer meat to non-meat foods.

I hope that helps.
Chris