Science Fair Project

[cougar4camping]

I was wondering if anyone could give me ideas for my daughter's science fair project. I'm so NOT creative and I just don't know where to start. They say to start with what interests you. My daughters sole interest is dancing. She's on a dance team. Anyone have any ideas how I can incorporate that into a science fair project? Any help would be greatly appreciated! TIA!

 

[hiwaygal]

Have you considered the physics of dance?

Perhaps she could develop something from that (check out the page about presentations) or even contact the professor to get some input directly from him.

I googled "the physics of dance" and got several hits.

 

[pfishgirl]

How about where Dance first started and how it evovled in time

 

[Bluestars]

This has nothing to do with dance, but my son did an easy science fair project and got an award for it. He made three batches of fudge using white chocolate. He put food coloring in one batch to turn it pink and put food coloring in another batch to turn it brown. He left the third batch white.

Then he cut the candy into small pieces and had people taste each color and try to guess the flavor. His project was to see if the appearance of the candy influenced how a person perceived the taste. It did. People thought the pink was cherry, strawberry, and flavors that you would associate with being pink. They thought the brown was chocolate, coffee-flavored, and things you would associate with being brown.

He also typed up a nice report to go with it. He included graphs and other things on his science board.

Good luck. I always hated science fair projects.

 

[Green Tea]

Heart rates; something about comparing the rates of dancers after X minutes of dancing vs. a runner or something like that? I know other kids were shocked when my DD did so well on those physical fitness tests b/c they had never seen her on a local team and assumed she wasn't athletic. She didn't have time for the teams, she was dancing all the time.

 

[barkley]

if you can find out what the types of projects they want are it will be easier for you to come up with one. at the science fairs of my youth we had to do a project that including us coming up with a hypothosis and then testing it out with the result included in the presentation. for some science fairs i've seen where they just allow a report on a given subject. if it's strictly a report i think it would be interesting to see if those medical issues that dancers seem to be more prone to later in life in anyway correlate to the dominant style they studied/performed (like are knee issues more common for ballerinas or is it spread across the board with jazz, tap and other styles). i'de find this intersting because i've been told that some of my issues with arthritis were likely caused by the kind of dancing i did-and i know plenty of former dancers who definatly had issues with joints and bones decades earlier than is common in non dancing women.

 

[lowie]

we actually completed DS's science fair project yesterday. he tested how long balloons would stay on the wall after being rubbed on your head 2,5 and 10 times. it was fun and pretty easy to do.

to the PP who mentioned checking heartrates after dancing, that was an excellent idea!

 

[ConcKahuna]

In middle school, one of my classmates did a project on the effect of different beverages on teeth. He went to a local dentist who happily gave him a dozen teeth to experiment with (I guess they have to do something with them after they pull them ). He let them soak in different beverages for a month, taking pictures of the teeth at 5 day intervals.

He did have to get permission from the school to bring the teeth in (since they were considered "human remains"), but it was a cool project.

And in his experiment, Diet Coke did the most damage. Almost nothing was left of the tooth

 

[cougar4camping]

These are EXCELLENT suggestions! Thank you so much! She does need to have a hypotheses. I like the idea of the fudge as it sounds really easy. I think she's going to try that one. I'll save the other ideas for coming up years as she'll have to do this every year now that she's in middle school. I like the whole dance experiment as her gym teacher is not giving her such good grades because I think he thinks she's not athletic and therefore, lazy. Little does he know though that she dances 4-5 days a week, 3 hours a day after school and that's just for practice, not to mention what she does for competition. That would be fun to prove some people wrong on their thoughts!

Anyway, thanks so much for all the suggestions! She's going to turn in her proposal tomorrow so hopefully it will get approved. If not, we have some ideas to fall back on now!

Thanks again!