SCIENCE FAIR...! Ideas (Proceedures -> optional) NEEDED!?

Question

My 6th grade niece needs help... What invention/creation can she present for her upcomming september science fair... against 1st years...

Need Ideas and how to do those NAO

Answer 1

I'd like to see a Science Fair project on why stuff that is "green" produces low concentrations of CO2 when CO2 is plant food. Stuff that produces  high CO2 concentrations would, in fact make plants greener, they would have plenty of food available.

or

Why we say that a product is "green" because it helps prevent global warming. Global warming (they claim) occurs as a result of the greenhouse effect. The fact is that global warming and the greenhouse effect will facilitate tree and plant growth. The world would be greener.

It seems like if you want stuff to be "green" you wouldn't take away the plant food or try to stop global warming and the greenhouse effect. Plants like greenhouses and food.

Maybe they should change green to white because there would be no smoke or pollution. And the polar ice caps and all that snow wouldn't melt. But green doesn't make sense.

Answer 2

In 4th grade I used chemicals to make oxygen in a test tube and demonstrated the presence of oxygen by sticking a smoldering splint in the oxygen.  The stick bursts into flame (safely of course)!  Lots of fun.

Another cool thing might be to build a wing and use wind to demonstrate how the wing lifts.  Kind of like a wind tunnel.

Answer 3

I did a science fair project on magnets once.  It wasn't too difficult - I subjected several similar magnets to different scenarios like fire, water, physical damage, etc and then tested which ones lost the mose magnetism.  Not to exciting but simple and fast.

Also, a Rube Goldberg machine is always fun to do.  If you don't know what that is - its a made up contraption with several diferent actions that create one final result.  Remember the game mousetrap?  It's like that.  You might start off rolling a small metal ball down a ramp that hit's a lever that pulls on a string that releases something else and so-on and so forth.  Essentially the object is to create several reactions in a system without human assistance.  The simplest ones have each reaction occur in sequence.  It's fun to do, creative, but most importantly scientific as it relies on alot of physics.  If you want an example, I'm sure there are a few videos up on you tube.  Just type in 'Rube Goldberg'.