Science Fair

Today was the school's science fair. All students in 4th through the 6th grades participated. There was a lot of duplication in project ideas. A ton of stuff on soda cleaning coins, various liquids to water plants with, soda and candy (think diet coke and mentos), nail polish or nail polish remover, which microwave popcorn has the most old maids, etc. Note to self, steer K away from all of these projects.

K's project was to see what was most effective in killing germs on hands: rinsing with warm water, washing with antibacterial soap for 10 seconds, washing with antibacterial soap for 30 seconds, and simply using hand sanitizer. I expected the 30 second wash and the hand sanitizer to be neck in neck. Hand sanitizer won, hands down (no pun intended). I was really shocked and appalled at how little difference washing hands for 10 seconds did. I thought it was a very well put together project, and I was very impressed with K's work. I was even more impressed after going to the fair and seeing all of the other kids' work.

M was looking at her project and pointed out that her samples weren't controlled since we used different people for each sample. He felt like that invalidated the experiment because we had no way of knowing how dirty each person's hands were before the experiment began. I felt like that was such a brilliant observation for an almost 8 year old to make!

I was a little irritated that they didn't have enough table space for all of the projects. What didn't fit on the tables was just kind of crammed onto the risers to the stage. K's was one of those. It made me feel like her project wasn't as highly valued, even though I really felt it was one of the nicer looking projects out there.