How to Choose an Award Winning Science Fair Topic

How to Choose an Award Winning Science Fair Topic: No lemon batteries, solar system models, or Mentos here!
with Michael Horton

This topic will be different than my usual Motivational School Leadership topic, but it's coming upon science fair time of the year so I find it appropriate.

Before I became assistant principal at a STEM school, I had been Science Coordinator at two county offices a science teacher at two schools and I've written two science books (here and here).  I have judged school, district, county, private, and state science fair projects.  My own children have both earned gold medals at the county science fair and as you'll read later, my daughter is in a national science fair competition right now.  As such, I often get asked for how to come up with a good science fair project topic.

Before I get into where to find a topic, let me say where NOT (I repeat absolutely NOT) to find a project topic.  Please, oh please, do NOT find your topic in a book about science fair projects.  These have all been done a hundred billion times.  But more importantly, most of the reason for doing a science fair project is to follow the process of science inquiry.  This involves doing research and designing an experiment to test a hypothesis based upon research or preliminary experiments.  These books have already done the research, have already identified a hypothesis, and have designed the experiment.  All that the students do is follow the recipe.  That is not science!

Secondly, please, please, please do not go to science fair project websites for exactly the same reason.  Science teachers are constantly trying to make cookbook science experiments into inquiry activities.  Most of these websites do exactly the opposite; they turn an inquiry-based science fair project into a cookbook activity.  Some of these sites claim to give opportunities at the end to turn the cookbook activity into an inquiry activity, but students rarely (read: never) make it that far and the judges end up seeing citrus batteries, baseball bat comparisons, catapult designs, mentos and diet coke, and how clean is a dog’s mouth projects again.  Some people are going to hate this advice.  This article is about award winning science fair projects.  I'd bet a great deal of money that nobody has ever won a big award (ISEF, Broadcom MASTERS, STS, Google Science Fair) with one of those topics.

So, now that I got that out, how should a student choose a science fair project?  Here are two ways:

1) Learn about science by listening to podcasts, reading age-appropriate science books, or talking to scientists.  As soon as the student says, “Hmm . . . I wonder . . ." they have a topic.  There are a myriad of free science podcasts for all ages on iTunes and online.  One of my favorites is the 60-Second Science series.  They have a podcast for Earth, Space, Health, Brain, and General science.  There is also a podcast called “The Naked Scientists” (don’t worry, it’s an audio only podcast and the only thing they strip down is science) with a section called “Kitchen Science” that gives great science activities to do at home.  They have a website with an outline of the activities here (http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/kitchenscience/).  There are many others too just depending on what area the student is interested in and how old they are.

2) Another way to find a science fair project is to go out in nature and observe.  When you think you’ve found a pattern, have a question about why something happens, or see a behavior that you cannot find an obvious reason for, then you’ve found your topic.  A student, for example, might notice that seagulls fly over the lunch area on weekdays, but they do not show up on weekends.  They might wonder, “How do the seagulls know what day of the week it is.”  They might notice an osprey on one highway in the morning and a different highway in the afternoon and ponder, “I wonder how far an osprey travels in a day?”  They have then found their topic.

My daughter and I were listening to 60-second Science episode about how bitter tasting substances can relax the airway of asthmatics faster and better than prescription medications.  There are taste receptors in human lungs that block the signals to constrict the airway.  After hearing this, she said aloud, “I wonder if cross-country runners would run better if they ate something bitter before a race.”  DING DING DING!  That’s a great science fair project topic!

Another time, we were listening to a podcast that talked about some students who had discovered that listening to low pitch sounds through headphones for a short time can get rid of the ringing in the ears caused by exposure to loud sounds (music devices, concerts, explosions).  She wondered, “Why low pitch sound, would high pitch sound work too?  How about if you matched the sound to the ringing?  I wonder if this would work for people who always have ringing in their ears (persistent tinnitus)?  How long would they have to listen?  How often?  What frequency works best?  How long would the ringing go away?”  There are 7 excellent, testable questions from one 60-second podcast!

Science News Magazine is a free children’s publication (pre-teen to teen).  Here’s an article about how changing pH of oceans due to climate changes affect the size of shelled plankton.  Students could test whether these differences are due to the acidification or the temperature by setting up several aquaria under different conditions of temperature and pH and observing the plankton under a microscope.  Here’s the link to the article: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/349745/description/News_in_Brief_Some_like_it_acidic and to the main site: http://www.sciencenews.org/

My daughter has worked in professors’ labs several times already (did I mention that she’s 11 years old?).  She once read a story about how if we could eliminate crop fungi, we could feed 600 million more people.  So, she got on the local university’s website, found a professor who studies fungi, and started working on a project about cenococcum geophilum.  Another time, there was an article about a beetle that had killed 80,000 oak trees in a neighboring county.  She contacted one of the researchers, found out how to identify damage from the beetle, and did a project that won a gold medal at the county fair and tomorrow, she flies to Washington D.C. to compete nationally against 29 other kids for $25,000 in the Broadcom M.A.S.T.E.R.S competition.  There are many professors out there who are willing to mentor science fair students, you just have to ask.  If you don’t live near a university, many of them will answer questions via email too!

Popular Science has put an archive of more than 130 years of the magazine online.  This is another great place to look. http://www.popsci.com/archives

For older students, try Scientfic American,  Audubon Magazine, Smithsonian, The Scientist, Science Magazine, or journals such as The Chemistry Central Journal and others.

What other resources have you found to help find legitimate, original, inquiry-based, science fair project topics?