4th Grade Science Fair Project - I need something great for my daughter. Help!

Put spiders in the microwave until you have a good estimate of how likely they are to develop superpowers.

Have her burn some coal in a sealed container with some plants and demonstrate that burning fossil fuels increases plant growth.

Make a water clock. Two buckets and spring.

Make an upright board to mount everything on.

Attach a bucket near the top and poke a small hole in the bottom.

Attach the other bucket to one end of a long stick. Not longer than your main panel is wide.

Drill a hole for the pivot point somewhere near the middle and bolt it to the upright board so that it can move easily. The bucket on the stick should be below the first buckets hole.

Attach the spring close to the pivot point on the bucket side of the stick and attach the other end to the upright board so that the tendon pulls up on the stick.

Draw an arrow on the other end of the stick.

That's it.

Now you calibrate it by pooring water in the top bucket and marking off time intervals as the lower bucket fills and the arrow sweeps through an arc. You can change the scale by moving the spring connection relative to the pivot point.

You can talk about spring constants, rates of flow, non-linearity.

Help her build an app for your iPhone that is compatible with a device she wears that lets you know when she goes out of a range that is unacceptable of your helicopter parenting...

I kid, I kid. I actually think it's great that you want to be involved and are supportive. What about testing people's heart rates before and after they hold a cat or a dog? Or tracking how much waste she generates in a day (e.g. packaging from food), and then coming up with ways of how she could change this? Ways of protecting an egg when dropping it from a set height?

1. Have her calculate your vdot.

2. Watch myth busters and recreate one of their experiments.

3. Poprocks and coke

Fcuk you and your kid

Try sciencebuddies.org

Cold fusion

Science Buddies has you covered.

http://www.sciencebuddies.org/science-fair-projects/recommender_register.php

Are you Muslim? If so, take the case off a digital clock and put it in a briefcase. Not only will you win the science fair, you're kid will receive a free ride to MIT on the spot, among other things.

Make a battery from a lemon

Make invisible ink

Just make sure you choose something that is not too hard for you to do.

Thomas Dolby wrote:

1. Have her calculate your vdot.

2. Watch myth busters and recreate one of their experiments.

3. Poprocks and coke

4. Don't forget Diet Coke and Mentos.

There's the old stand-by of seeing if a plane could take off from a giant treadmill......Prove it once and for all

She should build a mini particle accelerator.

Here's my advice as a science teaching undergrad:

1st, find something that you can test, and start with a question. You will find hundreds of fun experiments online where you "make a _____." This doesn't really let you discover anything.

For example: Buy some ph strips.

"What water source has the highest ph?"...test sink water, river, store water, groundwater, etc.

2nd, test only one variable. You need to find something specific. For example, you could test "which ball rolls the furthest down a ramp?" Just don't use balls that are a different size, weight, and material interchangably because you never really know if it was the size, weight, or surface that made it roll the furthest.

Possible ideas:

1. Buy bean seeds, place them in 5-10 cups. Water with a different liquid every day. (1 water, 1 sugar water, 1 coca cola, etc.) Referring to number 2, make sure you don't also test different amounts within that (because you could not get conclusive data). Find which one grows the highest in a certain amount of time.

2. Do the same as number one, just with water, and different amount each day.

3. Which paper towel brand absorbs the most water? Dunk same-sized sheets of water in water, measure the difference of water before and after they are dunked.

You get the idea. Find multiple things that could be compared, and make sure it's in a way that will not have too many variables.

The nice part about these things is that they are simple and cheap and you don't have to roll up with a contraption that you clearly made while your child sits there and shows off the project they learned nothing from.

Hope this helps.

Try different kinds of seeds, plant 'em down the holler'.

[quote]ScienceHelp wrote:

Here's my advice as a science teaching undergrad:

..

Possible ideas:

.../quote]

Or perhaps guide her to come up with a question for which she can use logic to make some a priori predictions, instead of just gathering a bunch of data and being astonished when all the treatments don't miraculously have the same mean.

See which makes a plant grow better, water or store brand cola. It's been done before, but soda is really, really due.