Eighth Grade Science Projects (220 results)
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Imagine that you have a list of names of all the people in your class. Someone asks you to put them in alphabetical order. How would you go about doing it? Would you first go through the entire list and look for all the "A" names? Then go through it again and look for all the "B" names, and so on? Do you think going through the list over and over again for each letter would be inefficient? What if you had hundreds, thousands, or even millions of names? How would you ever alphabetize them…
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Soil may look like a bunch of dirt, but good quality soil is actually a complex mixture of dirt, nutrients, microorganisms, insects and worms. What type of benefit do these microorganisms offer a growing plant? You can test this by baking soil in the oven to sterilize and kill the microorganisms. Do plants grown in sterile soil do better than plants in unsterilized soil? What about adding worms to one plant, but not to the other. Will the plant with worms grow better? Some insects are bad…
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Walk into a fitness club and what kind of music do you hear? Slow, sparkling, relaxing music? Or driving, "up-tempo" songs that are designed to encourage you to move? Fitness clubs and other businesses, like restaurants and grocery stores, use background music to set the mood and to determine how fast they want their customers to move. The tempo of the background music is a key component to the environment that businesses want to create. Tempo is an important number or word inscribed by a…
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Who doesn't love soaking up the last bit of gravy on Thanksgiving? Or dipping a crusty cube of bread into a cheese fondue? Or scooping up the thick juices from a fruit pie? Sauces make eating a joy! They provide concentrated flavor in a thickened liquid form, with a pleasing texture and consistency that carries or compliments the flavor of the rest of the food. No matter if they're salty, spicy, savory, or sweet, sauces make foods richer and more special.
There are many ways to thicken sauces,…
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Sleeping in class isn't allowed... unless you're a computer! In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggests that putting your school's computers to sleep when they're not in use might reduce a school's energy bill significantly. In a study done at the North Thurston public schools in Olympia, Washington, EPA officials worked with the district to cut computer energy and costs by approximately $45,000 annually! How? By implementing a variety of power-management strategies for the…
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Are you a snow aficionado? What atmospheric conditions produce light, powdery snow, and what conditions produce heavy, wet snow? This project shows you how to use data from daily balloon soundings of the atmosphere and your own snow measurements to find out.
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When you think of successful inventions from the 1900's that have dramatically changed how people live, what comes to mind? The car? Radio? TV? The computer? What about the microwave oven? You might not remember a time when microwave ovens were not a standard part of most kitchens, but your parents or grandparents probably do. They can remember when heating leftovers took a good 30 minutes in a traditional oven. Or thawing a food from the freezer meant leaving it in the refrigerator overnight.…
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In our introductory VoxCAD project, we provided you with a template file that included default material properties and physics simulation settings. These settings include friction, gravity, and temperature — all of which can drastically change how fast your robots move. However, we did not explain what exactly all these physics simulation settings meant, or how to change them. You can access the physics settings through the Physics Settings tab after entering the Physics Sandbox mode, as…
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In our introductory VoxCAD project, we provided a template with four materials: two active materials that expand and contract in the physics sandbox mode, and two passive materials — one hard and one soft. The project mentioned material properties, but it did not go into much detail — you just used the default settings from the template. Changing the material properties can drastically change how your robots behave. Engineers must take material properties into account when designing…
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One thing that all living things have in common is that they grow through cell division. How is this growth regulated? Sometimes growth occurs when it is not supposed to, leading to cancer. Scientists are trying to discover how growth is regulated, hoping to find potential cures for cancer. One idea is that cells keep track of growth using special regions of the chromosome called "telomeres" that count how many divisions a cell has made. If this is true, then growth, cell division and age are…
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