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Teacher Aides for Science
Projects
The Scientific Method in 12 Easy Steps
1. See, hear, taste, smell, and feel stuff and realize something makes
you curious.
| Curiosity. You've got to experience it!
If you were sitting under an apple tree and got whacked on the head by
a falling apple, what would you do?
A. Scream bloody murder.
B. Curse a blue streak.
C. Wonder why apples fall down and not up.
Old Sir Isaac Newton probably did both but he was curious, he
wondered about it. Its a small step, really but many people never
take it, they might be to busy screaming and cursing. |
2. Read, learn, and think as much as you can about the thing that makes
you curious.
| Once you're curious the next step is easy.
Just read about it. Try books, magazines, the library or
Internet. |
3. Keep looking until you find out what you are really curious
about. Understand that while you are looking one of two things may happen: You're not
curious anymore. This is good. Your research taught you
something. You're smarter and wiser and you may now return to your
regularly scheduled TV programs.
| Ask yourself, "Am I still curious?" You
need to keep looking at different ideas until you find something that you
still have a question about. |
When you get that special idea you may have opened the door to the next big scientific
discovery. Or at least a really cool science fair project.
You may
go on to Step 4.
4. Put your remaining curiosity into a single question you would like
to answer.
| Remember now, only one question , at a time. How do you know if
you have a good science fair question? A good science fair question
can actually be answered by YOU!! |
5. Take a guess at the answer. From now on, your job is to find
out for sure whether your guess is right or wrong.
| What is your answer called? Hypothesis!
All that means is that you have come up with an educated guess.
"Educated guess" means you have read and found some information
about your curiosity. |
6. Decide what you need to do to find out whether your guess is right
or wrong.
| So how are you going to PROVE IT?
There are three main way:
1. Do an experiment.
2. Do a survey.
3. Do some special research. |
Do experiments? Talk with some real experts? Do a
survey of people in your town? Go to some special library that none of
your friends have ever heard of?
| Three things to remember about planning EXPERIMENTS.
1. You should keep it small, ask only one question, your
experiment should try to prove only one thing.
2. You should plan on running the experiment more than
once, in fact, many times. When you can show that your results turn
out the same over and over again, it makes your project more believable.
3. Your experiment should be reproducible - that is - you
should plan it so well than anyone can do it and get about the same
results. The trick is to take notes and
describe everything you plan to do in as much detail as possible. |
| What if you want to do a SURVEY.
A survey often takes the form of asking people questions, counting
people, animals, or actions.
One thing is for sure, you have to get out there and talk to people
about your question, you need to keep careful notes. |
| Maybe you need to do SPECIAL RESEARCH.
This type of research usually involves getting information from some
specialist, they have information that is either hard to find or something
that regular people like us can't usually find, |
7. Do the experiments, talk to the experts, do the survey, go to
mysterious libraries - whatever it takes to satisfy your curiosity.
| YEA, THE HARDEST PART IS OVER!!
Remember, a real scientist does just about
nothing on the job without writing it down, PICTURES
ARE GREAT too! |
8. Think about your questions from Step 4 and your guess from Step
5. You may have guessed right, or you may have guessed wrong. But
now you know and your curiosity about your question has been satisfied, you've
learned something. And now it's time to tell the world.
9. Write down all the important stuff about your projects.
Describe your question, your guess, how you went about answering the question,
and finally, ta-da! the answer to the question.
| Think of this step as if you are writing a story
about your project. |
10. Shorten what you wrote so that all the important parts fit on a
poster (or something in a magazine article).
| Don't forget the abstract. After your
report is written you should go back and sum up all the important parts on
one sheet in no more than 250 words It should be short enough to
mount on an index card . People look at your abstract to get an
overview of your project. |
11. Use your poster or article to help you tell the world what your
learned.
| Think of a cool TITLE. The title is
the first thing people see when they look at your project and it MUST
capture their interest or they will pass you by. The title can do
the job. |
| Make your display. Make it COOL.
Make it NEAT and ORGANIZED. |
12. Take bows, accept applause, realize you're cool, have some shrimp.
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| YEA, YOUR DONE. If you did a GREAT
job you could win an award. |
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