You are now about half way through your winter break. Have you come up with your science fair project idea yet? If not don’t worry. You still have about a week to come up with an idea and to conduct your initial research.
One strategy that you can use to come up with an idea for your science fair project is to read through sample science fair projects. Sample science fair projects will not only provide you with information about a potential topic for your science fair project, but they will also provide you with a guide for how to write up your own science fair project.
Sample science fair projects can be obtained from a number of sources. The Internet is your best resource. Students post their winning science fair projects online, as do websites designed for science fair project products. You can use these samples to see what has done well in the past, as well as to find out what topics are not being received by science fair judges favorably. For example, right now electricity experiments and energy experiments are be encouraged as the foci for science fair projects because of the need for new energy technologies to be developed.
Keep in mind that you can not simply reproduce sample projects and turn them in as your own. This is basically project plagiarism. However, you can take a sample project and modify it so that it is unique. For example, you can change the variables being compared, you can apply the results from the sample project to a new question or problem or you can increase the depth of the experiment by completing more trials, by experimenting with more input variables or by making some other type of modification.
