Topic Research

• Project Types
• Three Steps to a Topic
• Research a Topic
• Topic Ideas

Keep a Journal
Purchase a bound notebook to serve as your journal. This notebook should contain topic and project research. It should contain not only your original ideas but also ideas you get from printed sources or from people. It should also include descriptions of your exploratory and project experiments as well as diagrams, graphs, and written observations of all your results.

Every entry should be as neat as possible and dated. A neat, orderly journal provides a complete and accurate record of your project from start to finish, and it can be used to write your project report. It is also proof of the time you spent searching out the answers to the scientific mystery you undertook to solve. You will want to display the journal with your completed project.

Selecting a Topic
Obviously you want to get an A+ on your project, win awards at the science fair, and learn many new things about science. Some or all of these goals are possible, but to reach them you will have to spend a lot of time working on your project, so choose a topic that interests you. It is best to pick a topic and stick with it, but if you find after some work that your topic is not as interesting as you originally thought, stop and select another one. Because it takes time to develop a good project, it is unwise to repeatedly jump from one topic to another. You may in fact decide to stick with your original idea even if it is not as exciting as you had expected. You might just uncover some very interesting facts that you didn't know.

Remember that the objective of a science project is to learn more about science. Your project doesn't have to be highly complex to be successful. You can develop an excellent project that answers very basic and fundamental questions about an event or situation encountered on a daily basis. There are many easy ways of selecting a topic. The following are just a few of them.

FromJanice VanCleave's Guide to the Best Science Fair Projects, Janice VanCleave (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997)

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