Project Guides (Page 2)

Science Fair Project Question

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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… Read more

Science and Engineering Project Laboratory Notebooks

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Keep a Great Science or Engineering Project Laboratory Notebook Whether you are a research scientist, an engineer, or a first-time science fair student, you should use a lab notebook to document your science investigations, experiments, and product designs. A lab notebook is an important part of any research or engineering project. Used properly, your lab notebook contains a detailed and permanent account of every step of your project, from the initial brainstorming to the final data analysis… Read more

Writing a Hypothesis for Your Science Fair Project

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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… Read more

Comparing the Engineering Design Process and the Scientific Method

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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. … Read more

Writing a Bibliography: APA Format

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Below are standard formats and examples for basic bibliographic information recommended by the American Psychological Association (APA). For more information on the APA format, see http://www.apastyle.org. Basics Your list of works cited should begin at the end of the paper on a new page with the centered title, References. Alphabetize the entries in your list by the author's last name, using the letter-by-letter system (ignore spaces and other punctuation.) Only the initials of the… Read more

How to Use an Arduino

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Learning to use an Arduino is a great way to learn electronics and programming skills. Science Buddies has many cool science projects you can do with an Arduino. Before you can move on to more advanced projects, you need to learn the basics. This How to Use an Arduino series is the perfect place to get started. This simple tutorial will introduce you to how to setup an Arduino, how to program an Arduino, and how to connect electrical components to an Arduino. Follow along with our… Read more

How to Write a Bibliography in APA and MLA styles With Examples

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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… Read more

Experimental Procedure

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Overview Now that you have come up with a hypothesis, you need to develop an experimental procedure for testing whether it is true or false. The first step of designing your experimental procedure involves planning how you will change your independent variable and how you will measure the impact that this change has on the dependent variable. To guarantee a fair test when you are conducting your experiment, you need to make sure that the only thing you change is the independent variable. And,… Read more

Define the Problem

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Finding an Idea for Your Engineering Project You know that you want to do an engineering design project, but how do you come up with an idea or find a problem to solve? How do you uncover a new problem that no one has tried to solve yet? Or how do you pick and choose, from all of the products, systems, and environments already out there, one that you might want to improve? This process of uncovering a problem, or identifying the need for change or improvement to an existing solution, is… Read more

Electricity, Magnetism, & Electromagnetism Tutorial

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Introduction This resource provides an introduction to different topics in electricity and magnetism that you may find useful when doing background research for your Science Buddies projects. The information you will find here is sufficient for most of the projects on the Science Buddies website, but remember that there are entire books written about each topic, so there is much more to learn! We recommend reading the sections in order, but you can click on the links below to jump straight to a… Read more

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