Project Guides (Page 15)

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What is SRC? Many science fairs have a group of people called a Scientific Review Committee (or SRC) that reviews each project application to ensure that all safety and legal requirements will be met and that the appropriate forms have been completed. The committee also reviews the completed project displays. Typically, a Scientific Review Committee is composed of at least three people: a biomedical scientist, a physical scientist, and a science teacher. Some fairs also have an Institutional… Read more

Scratch User Guide: Connecting & Using a PicoBoard with Scratch

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Picoboard alternatives Note: the Picoboard has been discontinued. If you do not have a Picoboard and are looking for a project where you can make electronics interact with the physical world, check out our Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects instead. They can accomplish all of the same things as the original Picoboard, and much more! The Picoboard was a piece of hardware you could plug into your computer's USB port. It let your Scratch programs interact with the outside world using… Read more

Scratch User Guide: Introduction

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Introduction What is Scratch? Scratch is an easy-to-use programming language that allows anyone (even beginners who have never programmed before!) to create their own interactive stories, games, animations, videos, art, and music on the computer. Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, and is available for free. Scratch can be used to create just about anything you can think of. To get a sense of the range of things people make in Scratch, take a look at… Read more

SRC - How to Get Started

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By: Benjamin Pollack The following is a quick guide to understand Scientific Review Committee (SRC) guidelines: In order to prepare for the SRC paperwork you need to realize that the SRC's goal is to protect you, your work, those affected by your work, and the integrity of the science community. Although there may seem to be a mountain of paperwork and rules to abide by, breaking the work down can make it a pretty painless process. I have heard SRC paperwork compared to filing taxes, but I… Read more

Storing Bacterial Strains

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Introduction If you are using a bacterial strain for a science project, it is a good idea to store the strain, at least temporarily, until after you are done with your experiment. After all, you may find that your experiment fails on the first try, or that the results of your experiment raise more exciting questions that you want to address with additional experiments. To ensure that you don't "run out of" bacteria, here are two possible storage methods: Read more

Using Animal Tracking Data from Movebank for Science Projects

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What is Movebank? Movebank is an archive of animal movement data collected by scientists in the course of their research. Many of these scientists have agreed to share their real data with you, a user of the Science Buddies website, to analyze and use in your own science projects. How do wildlife biologists track animals? In order to understand more about animal behavior and habitats, wildlife biologists track animals. They do this by attaching tracking devices, often called tags to… Read more

Visualizing Molecules in Three Dimensions

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Introduction Although we often see molecules depicted using two-dimensional (2-D) figures, they are in fact three-dimensional (3-D). Many scientific questions can be better understood by seeing and interacting with molecules in three dimensions. There are a number of tools available on the Internet that allow the user to rotate, flip, and otherwise manipulate virtual molecular models of chemicals and macromolecules. If you would like… Read more

What is Big Data?

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You might have read or heard the phrase big data used on the internet or in a television commercial. But what is big data? How is it defined, and how is it different from "regular" data? Can you use it for a science project? This reference page will help answer some of these questions and get you started exploring the world of big data. Data is information, and there are many different types of information. If you have done a science project before, you probably collected information by… Read more

When Competition Doesn't Turn Out the Way You Want

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An interview with Amber Hess. Strangely enough, the science fair Amber learned the most from was her first trip to the California State Science Fair (CSSF) in seventh grade—where she did not win anything. Her teacher had been kind enough to take her display board over to the regional fair. By pure luck, she was chosen as an alternate for the state fair, and someone who qualified for state dropped out. "I thought to myself, why not go? Who knows...it could be fun. At that point it was all… Read more

Winning Scholarship Essays

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Would you ever guess that feeding dog food to your family as a kid might help you earn a scholarship? That's exactly what happened to Lauren Croda, one of the recipients of a 2009 Bio-Rad scholarship! Applicants for the 2009 Bio-Rad Scholarship Program were asked to answer one of the two following questions: What can be done to encourage interest and participation in science? How can science be used to improve our world today? Below, you can read a little about each of the three winning… Read more

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