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Help me find an investigatory project

An investigatory project is a lot like a science fair project. The first thing to do is to come up with a question - anything that you ever been curious about?

  • Is natural light better for plants than green or blue light?
  • Do ice cubes made with salt water melt faster than those made with plain water?
  • Do people like milk chocolate better than dark chocolate?
  • Is there a correlation with age regarding chocolate preference - where more adults like dark and more kids like milk?
  • Do more people have brown eyes than blue eyes? [notes]
  • Does mold grow better on wheat or white bread? [notes]
  • How does a mousetrap car demonstrate important physical principles like friction, kinetic energy and potential energy? [notes]

You get the picture?

 

From asking the initial question, you can set out to find the answer... or investigate it. Some of the questions you can answer and some you can't. Pick one that you can and do a simple experiment and see if you can answer it, such as the "do plants need water" or the "salt ice cube" question. There are some questions that are really common and done all the time for science projects. The challenge for you is to find a project that is relevant (people care about the answer) and hasn't been done a million times before.

For specific examples, please go to a good search engine, e.g., google.com, and enter the search words:

"science project" chemistry

Literally hundreds of sites will come up with ideas and information. If you are not looking for "chemistry", use a field that you are interested in such as environmental science, botany, etc. A few examples of sites to help you get started are:

 

Another great resource for this sort of assignment is at the Internet Public Library.

You can also find some of the books suggested on these sites in your local library or bookstore.

Once you have a topic selected, it's time to apply the "Scientific Method". This is the way scientists have built up a body of knowledge that can be trusted, and help avoid accidentally deceiving themselves and others. See the following pages for a description of the scientific method.

 

Now that you have your topic, and understand how to conduct an experiment, it's time to go through the Scientific Method to do your investigative report.

Last updated 18 May 2007