Science fair projects can be intimidating for kids, and engaging reluctant students may prove challenging.
Start your students off right by giving them more freedom when planning their investigations – they don’t always need to match up neatly with peers’ presentations, either!
Rube Goldberg Machine
Rube Goldberg machines are complex devices designed to complete simple tasks through multiple steps. Students can use their creativity and everyday materials such as dominoes, marbles, balls, pulleys, ramps and levers to design these creations and then build them themselves.
Rube Goldberg Machine Contests provide students with an engaging way to stretch their creative thinking beyond conventional thought processes and ideas. This machine from Purdue Society of Professional Engineers showcases how an innovative, creative, and logical contraption can accomplish even complex tasks with ease.
Building a Rube Goldberg machine involves an iterative process that includes designing, testing, and refining. Students gain valuable skills such as perseverance and teamwork through this experience.
UV Beads
UV Beads are an eye-catching way to make the point that ultraviolet (UV) radiation is an invisible force capable of causing sunburn and eye damage. Indoors, the beads appear white; when exposed to sunlight or black lights, however, their colors change dramatically as soon as UV exposure occurs – returning back to pale white upon being taken away from UV sources.
Students can use these beads to test different substances that allow visible light through and those that block UV rays, including windows, car windshields and sunglasses – seeing which allow their beads to change colors while which block it. They could compare items such as windows, windshields and sunglasses against each other to determine which allow for change or not.
Optical Illusions
Optical illusions offer an engaging way to explore how images appear in your mind. These clever tricks demonstrate how your senses gather information from the world and then determine its perception by acting like personal assistants, making decisions on your behalf as to which are worthy of being paid attention to.
Physiological optical illusions use elements like color, light and movement to manipulate your mind. For example, the Herman Grid Illusion shows black boxes and white lines crossing in an intriguing fashion; when looking between these boxes where these white lines meet you can spot faint sphere-like images in between them.
Cognitive optical illusions utilize patterns and other visual elements to trick your eyes into seeing something that’s not actually there, like Hill’s Reversible Figure using pattern repetition to make you believe it changes when your eyes move.
Fingerprints
With this engaging experiment, students get a hands-on lesson in fingerprint science. By using an optical scanner to capture digital images of their thumbprints and compare these against patterns found within skin ridges and valleys, this activity explores fingerprinting from all sides.
Help kids engage their minds and hearts by getting them involved with this project that requires them to monitor their heart rates while engaging in various physical activities, or testing the effects of different kinds of music on them.
Learning density takes on an eye-catching new twist with this project, which uses liquids of various densities for an eye-catching experiment! Not only is the display attractive, but learning about density becomes visually impressive too!
Ice Melting Challenge
Ice melting is an interesting phenomenon. On a hot day, have your students observe and test which objects cause an ice cube to melt faster.
Before beginning their experiment, encourage them to write out their hypothesis for testing. For instance, they could hypothesise that an ice cube placed in salt water will dissolve more rapidly due to its use as de-icer in wintertime streets.
Divide your class into teams. Each will race to protect their ice cube from melting using various insulation materials such as felt, Styrofoam or newspaper insulators sheets – then keep track of how quickly it melted! Each team should keep a stopwatch handy to note when their cube melted away.
Elephant Toothpaste
Elephant toothpaste is an exhilarating, exciting, and engaging foamy science experiment for kids of all ages to perform. Using hydrogen peroxide and yeast, this experiment creates a foamy reaction resembling toothpaste being squeezed from a tube.
This classic middle school physical science experiment can also make an excellent classroom demonstration or party trick. Yeast serves as a catalyst to speed up hydrogen peroxide’s decomposition into water and oxygen, creating bubbles reminiscent of toothpaste!
Add the 3% hydrogen peroxide to any container (beaker, plastic bottle or lab glassware is fine). If desired, add dish washing soap and food coloring for extra flair.