What is a great science fair project idea for a senior in high school to do ?
something that might impress the judges?
Design an Orgasmatron. These always impress the judges.
If you make one that’s WIFI enabled for virtual orgies, you’ll not only impress the judges you’ll make a fortune!
+6251 One thing you might try is to compare evaporation rates for various water scenarios.
For example pour a gallon of water into buckets with
a) nothing
b) mostly gravel
c) mostly sand
d) a 50/50 mix
e) a bunch of ordinary sponges
weigh the buckets after you've done this.
Put these buckets into the same area and record the weight of the buckets vs. time
Since the gravel/sand/sponges don't change weight you are essentially measuring the evaporation rate.
Do this all carefully including measurement error. Grind your data through standard analysis routines to
come up with the rate +/- your final measurement error.
Present it all cleanly and clearly.
Cheap and easy experiment. Gives you a chance to do some real data analysis. This is actually a fairly important real life problem.
thank you very much! just one question..
how is evaporation rates an important real life problem. i fail to understand that.
+6251 I work with horses. Our corrals get flooded during rain and at some point evaporation becomes the
main way they dry. One of the things I have to do is spread the puddles from the low areas out so they'll dry faster.
The experiment should show that evaporation from the 100% sand is fastest, and evaporation from the 100% water is very slow.
This is why we use sand in corrals.
Drainage and evaporation also comes up in all construction, though it's more drainage there. At least if done correctly.
I suppose there are more exciting projects.
When I judged these things I looked more for good experiment design and data analysis than for bells and whistles.
We'd get projects where the parents clearly funded and helped that were real fancy but the write up showed the kid
had no clue. I didn't rate those well. Whereas we'd also get shoestring projects with a clear hypothesis and a
well designed experiment and good write up that I would rate very well.
You have any areas that you'd like to pull your project from? Any real world problems concern you?
i definitely would take your project idea into consideration. I was maybe leaning towards biology but it doesn't have to be that.
also how would i be able to display my results since it will be in an enclosed room. Should i just show my data results?
+6251 how would i be able to display my results since it will be in an enclosed room.
I don't know what you mean by this. Do you mean how do you take weight measurements w/o disturbing the system?
You don't. You just have to go in and take the measurement carefully and accept your interference as a source of uncertainty.
$50 won't get you robots to sit inside the room and do it. :D
+6251 An idea for a biology project might be to study the effect of increasing salinity on the development of freshwater organisms.
I was just reading that this is becoming a problem for North Carolina.
ahaha i agree!
Im a little bit slow in science please bear with me
you previously mentioned
"Since the gravel/sand/sponges don't change weight you are essentially measuring the evaporation rate."
if not for measuring the weight how else would i be able to know if it has evaporated?
+6251 if not for measuring the weight how else would i be able to know if it has evaporated?
No idea.
The water is going to be mixed in with everything, and absorbed by the sponge etc.
There's no visual measurement that will let know accurately know the water level.
Is weighing them a problem?
