Thing 6 - Harding Science Fair

All 9th graders at Harding are required to complete a science fair project. I've guided non-IB students through this process in the past. I've also guided 11th & 12th grade IB chemistry students through their "Group 4" science projects. This year I have pre-IB chem 9th graders. My goal was to keep the requirements for my 9th graders as close to the requirements for the full IB "Group 4" project as possible. The biggest difference was pushing them to investigate more challenging questions (no product comparisons or taste tests), to make the questions quantitative and objective, do a more in-depth job on the background research, and to complete a proper bibliography.

My students have done a great job selecting both challenging and quantitative questions. With few exceptions, their questions are as good as the questions by my full IB chem students. Ex:
* What is the relationship between the dissolved oxygen content in various samples of lake water and the amount of bacteria contained in the water?
* How does the quench temperature affect the strength of an iron rod after heat-treatment?
* How does the % sugar in a water solution affect the index of refraction of the solution?

A few things I did at the beginning of the project:
* Showed them past projects from the 11th/12th gr IB students, not 9th graders.
* Gave them a limited list of well-written quantitative questions. (If the list is too long, they tend to choose questions right off the list, rather than come up with their own questions.)
* Insisted that I would not accept any product comparisons or tests that rely on human subjects or opinions.
* Listed some of the cooler equipment at Harding they could use: vacuum chamber, UV lights, ovens, incubators, chromatography paper, Vernier LabPro detectors (motion, sound, light, pH), etc.

For students that struggled with coming up with questions, I gave them the list of science fair web sites. That helped some students. Eventually, I started just talking with the students about their hobbies: skateboarding, dance, music, food, etc., and we would go from there. Some questions that came out of these conversations:
* From an interest in Chinese lanterns -> What is the effect of % starch in a water solution on the amount of light transmitted through the solution?
* From an interest in music -> How does the length of a wind chime affect the frequency of the sound produced?

I hadn't read the RPC in detail until now, but I appreciated the emphasis on the front end...developing good questions. I think emphasizing the front end helped my students the most.