Your 8th grader may come home with an assignment that makes every parent nervous: the science fair. Help them choose an intriguing experiment to fulfill the requirements.
Students should use the scientific method to form and pose their question, research their topic area, develop and test a hypothesis with experimentation, then report back their findings and discuss results with others.
Rube Goldberg Machine
Rube Goldberg was a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist famous for creating complex machines using an extraordinary chain of events to achieve simple tasks. Constructing science projects inspired by Rube Goldberg is an excellent way to learn the laws of physics while showing creativity and engineering skill. Students should design their own machine that incorporates simple machines with kinetic energy concepts such as simple machines kinetic energy. They should verbally describe their contraption’s workings while being able to physically demonstrate it multiple times throughout class; any harmful materials (mousetraps, explosives etc) are prohibited as they could cause harm; students must not use mousetraps, explosives explosives explosives explosives explosives explosives explosives explosives or substances which would create large messes, fire or anything that would harm.
Discover if shampoo really does make hair grow thicker with this hands-on chemistry experiment designed for 8th grade science fair competitions. Enjoy seeing how different genres of music affect plant growth in this high school science experiment!
UV Beads
This art and science project provides kids with an introduction to electromagnetic spectrum theory as well as light and color reactions. Additionally, this experiment helps children recognize the significance of wearing sunscreen, sunglasses and hats whenever going outdoors.
Start this activity by giving each student a UV-detecting bead. Have them string it onto a piece of ribbon and wear it all week, keeping a journal about where and how often they wear it.
Each bead features photochromic dye that changes color when exposed to ultraviolet rays, but these beads are reversible – they will go back to their original state once the light goes away. Students will observe how quickly this reaction happens and use that data to predict when their beads will change back. They’ll then test their predictions and conduct experiments investigating how temperature affects this rate of transformation.
Optical Illusions
Optical illusions serve to illustrate how our eyes and brains can deceive us. Through simple visual tricks, optical illusions illustrate how the eye recognizes certain signals more strongly than others and assigns more importance than expected to certain things.
The Hermann Grid is one of the more well-known optical illusions. Although it appears as just a black and white grid, you may notice faint black dots near where two white lines cross, due to different receptors’ signals being received by your eye.
Try more complex optical illusions that feature two pictures at once, like the ambiguous cylinder or vase illusion. Also explore color perception, how color impacts our perception of an image or whether girls detect optical illusions faster than boys.
Reaction Time
Eighth grade science experiments provide kids with an incredible insight into the world. Students can test how different liquids affect a plant’s ability to grow, construct a Rube Goldberg machine or produce optical illusions. Furthermore, this collection offers experiments designed to teach engineering principles, physics theories and chemical reactions – among many more topics!
Reaction time is an integral aspect of human biology and an ideal science fair project topic. Students will measure their reaction time by catching a ruler that drops in front of them; they’ll also learn about nerve signals traveling from eyes to brain and then to fingers so that reaction times can be measured precisely. Students can experiment with factors that may alter reaction times such as being hungry or full, using dominant hands instead of non-dominant ones and different levels of cognitive processing ability versus lower cognitive processing ability (DCH).