Ideas for Science Fair Projects for High School Students
Participating in a science fair or a competition is an exciting opportunity for high school students. Developing your own science fair project as a high schooler can help you boost your science skills and expose you to new ideas and can even help you out during college applications! In this blog post, we are sharing ideas for science fair projects, including how you can get started with your science fair project, different examples of projects, and what steps are required for you to make your own science fair project.
Types of Science Fair Projects
Science projects can be done in different ways and varieties from exploding something to just analyzing data. There are many ways you can conduct a science project. But there are primarily 4 different types of science fair projects:
Experiment or Investigation
In this type of science project, you try to bust a myth wrong or try to prove it right. This is done following the scientific process starting by creating an educated hypothesis and following through till your final product. At the end of the project, you present whether you were right or wrong and the final result and analysis of the experiment.
i.e. testing water samples to see how alkaline clean they actually are.
Demonstration
This is the easiest type of project you can do. This project requires you to re-test an already done experiment to demonstrate to people what happened. You can find ideas on these from many places such as the Internet or science books.
i.e. making a papier-mâché volcano that blows up, or making a lemon battery.
Research
In this type of project, you collect all the known information about a certain topic and present all your findings as one. You can collect information by conducting an experiment, researching online, taking a survey, and collecting data.
i.e. developing a research project on how plants grow and die.
Model
You can build a model of something to illustrate a great concept or a design. This can be useful to help people understand an unknown concept or to show how something works.
i.e. a model of the human body, or a model of a clock to show how it functions.
Unique Science Project Ideas
It can still be really hard to find a good and interesting type of project to present at a science fair especially if you want to try to stand out from some of the other projects. That's why we have gathered some projects that we find unique that you could use:
Study the effects on plant growth after being exposed to different types of water
This is a pretty good experiment helping us understand the effects on plants after they’re watered with different types of water from, tap water, salt water distilled water, and more. This can be presented in an experiment/research project format showing the process and the results. The results, in this case, would be of the effects the plant had after being watered with different sorts of water.
Investigate the factors that affect the strength of a magnet
This can be a great experiment if you can access different types of magnets such as neodymium, ceramic, ferrite magnets and more. It can be a good idea to get a Gaussmeter to help measure the magnetic field strength of each magnet. You can conduct this experiment by using a test object such as a metal and moving closer and further away from the magnet and recording data. You can try different types of test objects (different metals) and test them with different magnets. You can even try changing the area's temperature to see how it affects the magnetic field. Your results of this experiment should help you understand the different factors that affect the strength of a magnet such as distance, temperature, magnet, metal, and more.
Build a solar oven
This is a really interesting experiment that can also be done with simple tools. This experiment helps us build an oven using solar while also showing us principles of thermal energy, reflection, convection, and other physics concepts. This oven will let you use the sun's heat to help you cook outdoors. You can find more information on how to make a solar oven at: https://www.childsci.org/test/build-a-solar-oven
Test water samples from different places to compare their PH levels
This experiment requires you to test different water samples from different places to check how pure they are based on the PH scale. You can use different water samples like tap water, bottled water from different companies, salt water, filtered water, and many more places you want. You can use a small ph test kit to find the ph level of each water sample and present it as a project. It could be surprising to find out that some samples of water are not as pure as you thought.
Construct a ballon-powered car
This would be a great model science project. You can make this using your own home supplies. This balloon-powered car will help us understand the basics of Newton’s Laws. It will help us understand the energy an object has also called Potential Energy, and the stored energy inside that an object beholds. Another benefit to this project is that your result will be really fun to play around with and have fun racing around in. You can learn more about making a balloon-powered car at: https://www.scprolab.com/post/balloon-car
Ideas for Science Fair Projects for High School Students
We have shared a couple of ideas of science fair projects in this blog post. Use the ideas in this blog post as inspiration to help you narrow down your search and decide which type of science project interests you most.
A science fair is one of the most exciting places to discover new ideas and research in the fields of science. Everywhere you look you’ll always see something exciting or intriguing from volcanos to chemical reactions to ballon-powered cars and more. Being part of a science fair is always a good idea!
About Inspirit AI
AI Scholars Live Online is a 10 session (25-hour) program that exposes high school students to fundamental AI concepts and guides them to build a socially impactful project. Taught by our team of graduate students from Stanford, MIT, and more, students receive a personalized learning experience in small groups with a student-teacher ratio of 5:1.
