Best Science Fair Resources 2014

Science fair help has never been closer, with these four websites, your students can enroll in challenges and competitions as well as access organized science resources to meet their objectives.  Siemens Science Day Learn by Doing offers monthly activity themes and experiments listed by difficulty level and a chance to win an interactive science assembly.

3M’s 2014 Young Scientist Challenge is “The nation’s premier science competition for grades 5-8” requiring new innovations or solutions that could solve or impact an everyday problem that directly affects student, their families, their communities, and/or the global population.

Discovery Education partners with Elmer’s to offer a Science Fair Central with projects, presentations and a leveled idea finder to assist students in finding their science fair investigative passion.

 The Science of Everyday Life sponsored by Discovery Education and 3M makes accessible the science of everyday life to make meaningful connections. Student explore the science around them with games, families  can find learning activities to try at home,  teachers have standards-based lesson plans and videos, and in Innovation Headquarters, innovators explore virtual labs.

Using Edmodo to Collect Data for Science Fair Projects

Middle school teachers battling with science fair projects and the collection of real data have many resources at their disposal.  Students can create surveymonkeys, polldaddys or Google forms to collect data.  The problem lies not in the creation of the collection tool, but in the dissemination of the actual surveys to a participating audience.  Here is an example of a science teacher from Virginia reaching out to his professional learning community in edmodo to assist his student in her objective. This plea will garner many responses, beyond what the student needs, because teachers love to help one another. As a result of Mr. Bearman's post, there will be teachers who will use this link for their own students to complete in science classrooms across the globe. This student will have more responses than she could have ever dreamed of and will be able to find correlations for her research based on a huge sample size.  If you want to add your own response to her project use this link and complete the survey yourself!