When You Were In Elementary School -- What Was Your Science Fair Project?

This might tick off some animal rights people, but when I was in elementary school and the science fairs would come around I used my pet in an experiment.

My box turtle, Yertle III (after Yertles I & II either ran away or died) assumed the role of lab rat in my experiment about....wait for it....

"Can A Land Turtle Swim?"

A 10-gallon tank, filled with water, with some rocks on one side. Yertle was placed in the tank, on top of the rocks. Whenever a parent or teacher would come around, I'd take Yertle off the rocks and plop him into the water.

He's race around, flapping his little arms in a desperate attempt to get back to the rocks.

Thus proving that, yes, land turtles can swim. :)

So what experiment did you do?

Since the answers can be so varied, I only put up three options, with two of them being the most common experiments.

B-)

Mine was constructed from stucco though.

Not many folks can make the claim that their volcano had wire mesh, covered with stucco to use as their volcano.

Very well painted too I might add.

dealt with gardening. I really love to work in the garden. Well, I had all these different pots and I had grown red and white carnations. I made them into cut flowers and put them into pots. There were 7 individual pots. I had 6 experimental groups and one control group. In the experimental groups, I put in the pots 7-up, Clorox, Flora-life, and I forgot the other experimental groups.

but the funniest one my daughter did was to see if spitting out toothpaste when you camp or backpack damages plants. She put toothpaste water on the plants for a month. She went to the county with that one...LOL

but my 10 year old brother in the 5th grade is doing one now .

the thing was six feet long. The teacher was horrified, saying "I wanted you to spend a few hours, not emulate the Apollo space program".

...paper towel and toilet paper rolls. I also got some nifty stuff from the NASA public affairs office on the under construction Space Shuttle.

But if so, it's been so long ago that I don't remember.

Then a couple of other guys did one that simulated mudflows, as well as lava, and used burning magnesium to simulate ashfall. Mine looked pretty lame by comparison.

I made displays of various classic optical illusions (Black and Whit blocks produce gray blocks in between. Red and Blue causes you to concentrate on one not the other (you can't look at both at the same time) The old lady/young girl drawing.

I explained how they worked. Hand painted them myself. :D

I hated school, especially math and science. Now I'm pretty interested in science, I wish I had been into it when I was in school.

to demonstrate the rotation of the earth and how rotating items can move stationary items. I held something on a string over the turntable and it moved. I had some research also about how rotation affects the planets but I really don't remember the particulars exactly.

It was easy and no one had thought of it.

Except I had the sun in the middle and showed how all the planets rotate around it by putting the turntable upside down and attaching the plantes to it.

i studied birds. i didn't have an experiment just watched them for a few weeks and recorded what i saw. i drew them too, which is the reason imo, why i came in second.

The answer is no.

(Hey, I was 7...)

Because I did a science project on that. But the coolest one I did was on the wonderful world of plants.

Little factoid: He dances perfectly in step with "Ojay Como Va". LOL

edit: also Steely Dan's "Reeling in the Years"

you know, a multiple choice box, and the wrong button would "BUZZZZZ".

I also did one on harvesting electricity from lemons, but it didn't work.

Excuse me, I have to go and adjust the tape on my glasses now...

using two white mice and feeding experiments with various colored lights... My Dad fell for the mice, believe it or not, and would sit down in the basement playing and talking to them! Funny.....

--I'm so old they weren't doing them back then (It was shortly after the earth cooled and the dinosaurs died out) but my kids had to, and I HATED science fair projects. My kids were never had any decent ideas, even when they finally came up with something, they couldn't figure out how to do the experiment in a coherent way or how to gather data or how to write up the thing. I was so grateful when they no longer had to do them.

I really wanted to do an experiment on why some er...*doo-doo* floats and some doesn't. I wasn't even trying to be funny, either! My dad even talked to the teacher about it, how we'd do it so that it wasn't too graphic or whatever... she wouldn't go for it though. :(

Think I ended up doing something about light refraction, which was cool, but nigh these many years, I've been left wondering...

a model of one made out of pipe cleaners and colored styrofoam balls. I remember it falling apart numerous times.

I wanted a C, I got a C!

I remember that my best friend did an experiment feeding whiskey to rats and seeing how it affected their time through a maze. She overdid it and killed all the rats.

Too bad, I'd have enjoyed that.