Science Fair 2016-2017

Welcome and Thank You for coming – Please feel free to ask Questions throughout Your Role as a Parent To help your student meet their deadlines. (remind, ask, look, but please don’t do) To encourage and cultivate excitement through asking questions and talking about your student’s plans and needs. (to help purchase necessary materials) To help arrange times to supervise if test subjects are needed for data collection or your child has a safety concern in their project. (to serve as a test subject if needed!) To periodically ask if there are obstacles your student is encountering. (please encourage them to see me if they are struggling) To encourage and allow YOUR CHILD to be the driver and doer of THEIR project.

Students - The MOST important things to remember Dates, dates, dates – if you meet your deadlines you WILL succeed. Every step can be redone if necessary (obviously we want to avoid having to redo data as it should be the largest single time consuming piece – therefore MANY procedure revisions are advised.) Rough drafts are given much feedback (Students, please DO use the feedback – I spend MANY hours going over your material, please respect my time and don’t turn in procedures and other pieces with the same mistakes that I have corrected.) When rough drafts aren’t done and turned in for feedback the project grade suffers. HAVE FUN !!!! And give yourself time to EXPERIMENT. A good scientist often fails many times before reaching a solution.

The importance of a great procedure. It will improve your ability to create valid meaningful data. (for example, no blood pressure checks with a single number – systolic and diastolic both) (for example, students won’t have so many independent variables that their data is meaningless – had this with a student checking ball pressure) It will help students avoid needing to redo data in most cases. Please help make sure your students understand the importance of data integrity (it is more important to be honest with data – I have had 2 to 3 students per year that fabricated their data and had to redo it.)

Poster Boards We will be working on the poster boards at school when the project is nearing completion. Parents have been very grateful in the past for my timelines and also for allowing poster board work at school as it takes much stress away from the home. Please do not do the poster board at home (in a few cases some finishing touches can be added) – but it is a very fun week where we work on posters together. It is a bit of a reward and students have always enjoyed this tine. Another benefit, students help motivate each other because they see other great ideas and can ask me if they are confused about how their layout should look.

Timelines Please see mcarthurmedia.weebly.com – under the 7th grade science fair tab. 2nd_qtr_science_fair_dates_2016.docx I will pass out a 3rd quarter timeline before Christmas (3rd quarter starts quickly after Christmas).

An Example from last year 2015-2016 – NOT this school years – will be very similar.  January 10 points Signature stating packet has been reviewed and trial run finished Due 1/6/16 20 points Purpose, Hypothesis and Safety sheet due Due 1/8/16 20 points Peer edited and corrected version of procedure Due 1/15/16 20 points Complete Raw Data Due 1/29/16 If data gathering will go past this date, you need to turn in data gathered to this date and get prior approval to not have complete data submitted on this date.)  

February 2016 (these were last years dates, sample only for discussion)   20 points Data tables typed and correctly titled Due 2/05/16 20 points Graphs printed and correctly labeled with units. Due 2/12/16 15 points Rough draft of Analysis of Data (Results), and Conclusion Due 2/18/16 10 points Title page/table of contents + acknowledgements Due 2/25/16 20 points Turn in rough AND final draft of Data, Analysis of Data Due 2/25/16 (Results), and Conclusion

March 2016 (these were last years dates, sample only for discussion) 20 points Abstract (BRIEF summary of purpose, procedure, Due 3/4/16 and conclusion, 200 words max) 10 pts BLANK tri-fold poster board (36”x48”) AND Report cover Due 3/4/16 are brought to school   100 pts Final Experiment/Research Paper Due 3/11/16 30 pts Printed POSTER size and font version copy of poster parts Due 3/14/16 (includes question, hypothesis, procedure, pictures, data, graphs, analysis, experimental error, and conclusions) Pts TBD Final assembled poster (posters are primarily made in class) Due 3/22/16 25 pts In-class oral presentations 3/22-3/24/16

This year’s date April – 27, 2017  ??? Principal presentations Pts 20 Science Fair Showcase in the evening for public - 4/27/2017

More Questions/notes?