Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello, I am a tenth grader who recently joined Science Research in order to find an intellectual way to spend time (actually, I hope to go into that field one day and want to try it out some how) and I need to come up with a question that has no answer yet about asthma. Problem is, every question I do have seems to all ready be taken, like the correlation between air quality and asthma. Can anybody offer some form of help to get me started? Thank you.

SyntaxSolution,

It is always difficult to determine what exactly you want to study for a science fair project. In your case, you have chose to research asthma which is already huge progress for you.

It appears that you are interested in doing research that hasn't been done before. From my experience it is best to find literature on Asthma, to do so you need to read tons of recent journal articles. These articles often have a section about future research and what 'factors' haven't been addressed yet.

Another way to do this is to find a mentor. A mentor is usually a college professor or research that is willing to a assist you in a independent scientific research project. They can be an extremely valuable resource. Especially since you are interested in respiratory care/research as a future career. Therefore, a mentor will not only help you with your project but show you what the career is like.

Here is the link to the advanced project guide that will be a valuable resource for you. ]https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science ... ov/pubmed/. Also you can view the abstracts for any study which can be valuable as well.

I suggest that you start reading articles about asthma research in order to brainstorm ideas.

Let us know when you have made a little bit more progress,
- Travis Sigafoos

Hi SyntaxSolution,

While it would be ideal to start a completely new project about asthma, there is value in recreating or reproducing the results from a previous project. Good science is always reproducible. If you come a cross a well designed experiment you might want to try to recreate it. Perhaps you could tweak the parameters slightly and see how that affects the original results.

I hope that helps.