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What is the Scientific Method?
The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to explore observations and answer questions.
Do all scientists follow the scientific method exactly?
No. Some areas of science can be more easily tested than others.
For example, scientists studying how stars change as they age or how dinosaurs digested their food cannot fast-forward a star's life by a million years or run medical exams on feeding dinosaurs to test their hypotheses.…
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What is the Engineering Design Process?
The engineering design process is a series of steps that engineers follow to come up with a solution to a problem.
Many times the solution to a problem involves designing a product (like a machine or computer code) that meets certain criteria and/or accomplishes a certain task. This process is different from the Steps of the Scientific Method, which you may be more familiar with. If your project involves making observations and doing…
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7-bit ASCII Character Codes
The ASCII table contains letters, numbers, control characters, and other symbols. Each character is assigned a unique 7-bit code. ASCII is an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.
Decimal
Octal
Hex
Binary
Value
Description
…
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What are Variables?
In science, a variable is any factor, trait, or condition that can exist in differing amounts or types.
Scientists try to figure out how the natural world works.To do this they use experiments to search for cause and effect relationships. Cause and effect relationships explain why things happen and allow you to reliably predict the outcomes of an action. Scientists use the scientific method to design an experiment so that they can observe or measure if changes…
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What is a Bibliography?
A bibliography is a listing of the books, magazines, and Internet sources that you use in designing, carrying out, and understanding your science fair project.
Your bibliography should include a minimum of three written sources of information about your topic from books, encyclopedias, and periodicals. You may have additional information from the Web if appropriate.
But, you develop a bibliography only after first preparing a background research plan — a road…
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What is an acid or a base?
Whether a liquid is an acid or a base has to do with hydrogen ions (abbreviated with the chemical symbol H+). In water (H2O), a small number of the molecules dissociate (split up). Some of the water molecules lose a hydrogen and become hydroxide ions (OH−). The "lost" hydrogen ions join up with water molecules to form hydronium ions (H3O+). For simplicity, hydronium ions are referred to as hydrogen ions H+. In pure water, there are an equal number of hydrogen…
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Finding an Idea for Your Science Fair Project
One of the most important considerations in picking a topic for your science fair project is to find a subject that you consider interesting. You will be spending a lot of time on it, so you do not want your science fair project to be about something that is boring.
We know that finding a topic is the hardest part of a science fair project, and sometimes you just need a little help focusing on what sorts of topics would be of interest to…
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Many electronics projects use something called a breadboard. What is a breadboard, and how do you use it? This tutorial video will give you a basic introduction to breadboards and explain how to use them in beginner electronics projects; you can also read more details and see more examples in the text sections.
More About Breadboards
Introduction
What is a breadboard?
Where does the name "breadboard" come from?
Are there different kinds of breadboards?
What is a "solderless"…
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What is a Hypothesis?
A hypothesis is a tentative, testable answer to a scientific question.
Once a scientist has a scientific question she is interested in, the scientist reads up to find out what is already known on the topic. Then she uses that information to form a tentative answer to her scientific question. Sometimes people refer to the tentative answer as "an educated guess." Keep in mind, though, that the hypothesis also has to be testable since the next step is to do an…
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While scientists study how nature works, engineers create new things, such as products,
websites, environments, and experiences. Because engineers and scientists have different
objectives, they follow different processes in their work. Scientists perform experiments using the scientific method; whereas, engineers follow the creativity-based engineering design process.
Both processes can be broken down into a series of steps, as seen in the diagram and table.
…
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