My daughter is in the sixth grade and she has a science fair coming up. We would like to do something relating to weather.
Does anyone have an idea for an experiment or project having to do with weather that could be done in a couple weeks’ time? I’m drawing a blank, myself.
Thanks so much for your help. Now, back to your regularly scheduled discussion.
Think big. Get a kite, some copper wire, and a key. Head outside during a rainstorm and discover the wild, wonderful world of electricity in your own backyard!
Try Bill Nye the Science Guy for some ideas and how to do them. A quick look had several weather realted one under Planetary Science/Earth Science. Some ideas were a barometer in a bottle and your own tornado.
You also might check out IPL Science Fair Project Resource Guide if you want other ideas.
The way to stand out is to avoid picking a project from a pre-packaged scien fair book. boring. Ideally, the experiment should be something that your child is interested in understanding, or should answer a question she has about the weather. At some point, someone will ask her how she got the idea for her project. In any case, here’s a quick idea.
Purpose: study heat islands - the effects of urban design on local weather. This is certainly not beyond the understanding of a bright sixth grader.
Materials: Run down to your local home improvement store and pick up some samples of various materials - brick, concrete, asphalt and slate tiles, and wood shingles. Also, pick up enough thermometers for each type of material, plus two more. They don’t have to be expensive, just all of the same type. They can be cheap, too, because she’ll be looking at trends rather than precise temperature readings. The last time I needed a bunch of cheap thermometers, I bought them from Edmund Scientific.
Setup: Place the tiles and shingles a few feet apart in a well-lit area of your backyard away from the shadows cast by your house. Suspend a thermometer a few inches above each type of material using a stick and some string. Take one of your extra thermometers and suspend it a few inches above a patch of grass and put another under a tree in some shade. Leave these items exposed for the duration of the experiment.
Procedure: Over the next two weeks, record the temperature at each thermometer at regular intervals. For a kid in schoool, check the temp in the morning before catching the bus, immediately after retruning home, and once before bed. Note and changes in weather - rain in particular.
Analysis: When she’s finished, she should be able to describe a heat island and its effect on the weather in cities. She should also be able to describe the differences between various building materials and make suggestions for reducing the heat island effect.
Science fair tips.
In the end no matter how hard the kid worked it’s all about presentation if you want that work to be recognized.
The experiment has to be simple enough to be explained easily.
Use the extra white professional tri-fold foam board not the cheaper cardboard kind and do all the text layout on a PC with different panels and use lots of pics and diagrams and sharp color graphs.
Glue, not tape for a seamless appearance and gluing or attaching some low profile, eye catching bit of the experimental apparatus directly to the board is always a plus (if allowed).
General Questions is for questions that have factual answers. IMHO is for opinions and polls.
I’ll move this to IMHO for you.
DrMatrix - General Questions Moderator
Helium baloons. Attach your E-mail address. Release.
Make a map of responses.
Ron
Thanks for the great ideas. I love the heat-island one. We may work on that.
Sorry if I posted in the wrong place. I thought about it, but I wasn’t quite sure.