2. THE "HOW" OF PROJECTS

Although the best science projects seldom are created ac­cording to a recipe, there is an orderly series of steps that is followed pretty universally by successful students and professional scientists.  

Seven Steps to a Successful Project

1. Decide on the specific problem or process you want to investigate.
2. Think it through, planning progressive steps, controls and checks in some detail. Try to foresee blind alleys before you become stalled in them. List unwanted factors that might influence your results and plan ways to prevent or make use of such accidents.
   
3. Read widely, since success with science projects depends largely on how much you know about your subject Such reading will increase your understanding of the possibilities and limitations of your project and help you to see it in context. In addition to your school library, try the public libraries in your vicinity, and university, college and specialized libraries for books, journals, monographs and theses on your subject. When you have discovered relevant materials, dig into them deeply and take accurate notes, being sure to keep a complete record of your sources so you can give proper credit for borrowed material. If very little has been published in your field of investigation,  at least you will know this and can include a statement to this effect in your project.
   
4. Talk to other people about your project and consult them about your plans. Often another student or an adult can find a fuzzy area in your thinking, detect an error or sug­gest a method that will save you many hours of work or frustration. When you have gone as far as you can alone, pro­fessional scientists and technicians usually will be glad to help you over the rough spots. You will, of course, be considerate about querying them when they have time to answer, and only after you have done enough reading and thinking to be able to ask really intelligent questions. If you do not abuse their helpfulness, you may find adults eager to offer suggestions and even to lend you equipment, publications and other ma­terials you might never discover for yourself. However, do not write an organization to send you everything it has on the subject, or expect the staff scientists to do your project for you.
   
5. Set up a notebook that will include accurate records of your original ideas, good and bad guesses,  notes on your reading, all of your experiments and observations and graphs, tables, drawings, photographs or whatever is relevant and use­ful.
6. Begin the experiment or progressive steps of your project and establish the controls against which you will check each result. If the experiments do not yield the information you are looking for, record the results anyway and salvage whatever is useful in designing new experiments and controls. Remember that failures are instructive too. It often is extremely valuable to know what does not work.
7. Summarize your conclusions, when you have repeated your experiments sufficiently often to feel sure that your re­sults are valid. Your conclusions may be positive or negative, since it is often as useful to prove a hypothesis false as true. If your work on this project opened up new questions that you hope to investigate, by all means mention these, too.

Writing a Report

Although there are many ways of writing about scientific work, the usual form for a written report is something like this:

1. Title—accurate, but not self-consciously long in an effort to impress
   
2. Summary—brief statement of the problem and the gist of your research
   
3. Introduction—reason for your interest in the problem, relevant work done by others, background information
   
4. Discussion of problem and hypothesis you are investigating
   
5. Details of materials, equipment, methods, steps of experiments, controls
   
6. Summary of observations and data
   
7. Conclusions drawn from observations
   
8. New questions, possible  applications, future plans, ifany
   
9. Appendix—graphs, tables, photographs, drawings
10. Bibliography and acknowledgements

Suggestions for Beginning Projects

If you are quite new at projects, obviously you won't want to undertake something like "Negative Ion Replacement as a Function of 'F' Centers in Alkali Metal Halides" (which was done by a member of the Honors Group of the Eight­eenth Science Talent Search). To get the hang of it, try a sim­pler investigation that still allows a little room for originality, or do your own version of one of the classic experiments to see how scientific history was made.
Some of these might appeal to you or suggest others you would find especially interesting.

"An Electric Motor"

"Collections and Their Uses"

"Crystals and Crystal Forms"   

"How the Telephone Works"

"Edison's Light Bulb"

"Electroplating"

"What Is in a Log?"

"Chemical Gardens"     

"The Effects of Weather on Man"

"Uses of the Fulcrum"  

"How Human Beings Perceive Depth"
                   
"Effects of Chemicals, Auxins, Light on Plants"

"History of the Horse"

"Acid Production in the Mouth"

"The Stroboscope"

"Gravitational Laws"

"Psychosomatic Medicine"

"How Modern Mathematics Developed"

"Archimedes'  Principle of Buoyancy"

"Optical Illusions"

"Exploring Fluorescence"

"Ben Franklin's Kite"    

"How a Tooth Decays"

Directions  for  Beginning   Projects

The following instructions came from material prepared for directors of science fairs affiliated with the National Science Fair-International, and for cooperating newspapers by Joseph H. Kraus, coordinator of the National Science Fair-International. These instructions will enable new stu­dent-scientists to begin work immediately on projects of their own.

An interesting project could be done by listing wild and cultivated plants that contain the milky substance called latex, collecting specimens of the plants, extracting the natural rubber, recording quantities obtained and experimenting with the sticky material.

The most important nontropical plant from which rubber is obtainable is guayule, but there are others which give latex, among them the desert milkweed, Indian hemp, goldenrod, some plants in the spurge family and some in the dogbane and nettle families. The common rubber plant, popular in the home, also will yield latex.

If you break off a leaf or small twig from a shrub or tree and see a milky white substance exuding from the break, you can assume that the sap contains rubber latex, particularly if it feels sticky to the touch. Make sure, however, that you avoid handling any of the growths toxic to the skin, like poison ivy or oak, or poison sumac.

While the cleanest sap will be obtained by the drip method, like that used in collecting latex from rubber trees, you may not have enough time to use this method. So up­root a number of specimens. Avoid crushing them until you get to your laboratory, then press out the juices by first cutting the stalks and then pressing them through a fruit press or a colander. Pass the liquid through a small piece of cheesecloth to free it of any foreign matter.

Measure the amount of liquid you have obtained. Dilute it with 2½times as much water and stir. Add as much dilute acetic acid as you had original juice and observe the coagu­lation of the rubber latex. Milkweed is a good plant with which to try this experiment first.

Rubber latex can be purchased in small bottles, cans and tubes from art supply stores, garages and other places where it is sold for use as an adhesive and for making rubber molds.

Either this or the latex you get from plants may be used to illustrate the vulcanization process.

Stirring constantly, add latex slowly to about 25 times its volume of carbon tetrachloride, readily available from local stores under the trade name of Carbona. A colloid will form. To this slowly add about half as much powdered sulfur as you had latex, stirring constantly.

Place the mixture in a water bath (this operates on the same principle as the kitchen double boiler) and heat to the boiling point of water for about a half hour. If you have no water bath you can use a double boiler or place a small pot inside a larger one containing the hot water. Make sure the water doesn't boil out. Vulcanized rubber will be produced.

The hardness of the rubber depends on the quantity of sulfur added to it. The hardest rubber contains about thirty-two percent of chemically combined rubber. Many other sub­stances may be added to it to modify its properties—catalysts, fillers, antioxidants and the like—and everything from huge conveyer belts and road surfaces to pillow stuffing and thin sewing machine thread can be made from rubber.

Two small mirrors, a piece of wood and a cardboard disk are all you need to make a range finder which will tell you the distance of a faraway object. Its precision will depend to some extent on the length of its base arm, but making and using even a small range finder will illustrate all the principles involved.

Mirrors for the range finders can be obtained from ladies' discarded compacts. Or you can cut a large broken mirror with a glass cutter into 2 pieces nearly alike, to measure about 1½by 1 inch each. Try to get very thin glass mirrors to avoid double reflections. Or if you are familiar with the tech­nique of making mirrors, make them from a couple of microscope slides, large cover glasses or, better yet, use surface-coated mirrors on optical flats.

Place a metal-edge ruler on the backing of one of the mirrors so that it divides the space in half horizontally. With a sharp razor blade cut through the backing and scrape off all the silver from half the glass. No such treatment is needed on the second mirror.

With a compass draw two identical circles on a piece of stiff cardboard. The diameter of these disks should be slightly longer than the length of your mirror. Cut out both disks. On one circle draw a line through the center, then draw two lines parallel to it, one on each side. The total space between these lines should be the thickness of the mirror. In the center draw another circle, slightly larger in diameter than the head of a thumbtack. Cut out the space between the lines and cut out the inner circle. You now have a split disk to accommodate the tack head and mirror.

Before doing any further work on the disks, take a piece of wood about 3 inches wide, ½inch thick and 1 foot long, and push a tack into it near one end. Remove the tack. The hole it has made will mark the position for the disk.

Now cement the split disk to the solid disk, making sure that the outside edges match. While the cement is still soft, push the thumbtack into the center position of the bottom circle. Stand the unscraped mirror vertically in the slot pro­vided in the disk. Stick a couple of pins against the mirror to hold it in place and apply cement along the edges. Model airplane or any celluloid cement is good for this purpose. When the cement is dry, mount the disk on the wood with the thumbtack pushed into the hole previously made. Ar-range a metal tab or other index marker, preferably bent over the edge of the disk, for indicating distances.

Near the opposite end of the wood, draw a line at a 45° angle to the edge and cement the half-scraped mirror upright along this line, mirror half upward. If you have no instrument for obtaining a 45° angle, you can do this easily by folding a square piece of paper along the diagonal and using it to es­tablish the angle.

Look through the clear part of the stationary mirror at some vertical object. Rotate the other mirror until you can line up the reflection of the object with your view of the object through the clear area.

Place your range finder on some solid object and bind or weight it so that it will not be disturbed. For easy calibration select a position alongside a picket fence more than 100 feet long. Measure the distance from the range finder to a picket just 10 feet away. Spear a piece of paper on a picket, then return to your range finder, adjust it to align the picket in the clear glass and the mirror and mark "10 feet" at the place on the disk indicated by the pointer. Repeat for other distances. Now you can use the range finder holding it in your hand.

Once the principle of making a range finder is established, you probably will want to experiment with modifications. In­stead of making your own disk you can use a radio dial or even the vernier control found in some radio sets. You may have to hacksaw a slot through the dial or file a slot through a cutoff condenser shaft to get your mirror properly held, but many a radio dial will allow for vernier precision and great accuracy of readings.

Then try a very long base line, about 6 feet or so, for es­tablishing accuracy at greater distances. A knob at the sight­ing position connected by string to the rotating disk will make it easy to regulate the position of the mirror. But calibration should be made at the mirror circle because of stretch of the connecting cords which would defeat accurate reading at the control knob position.

To avoid reflections from the surrounding areas you can make the whole thing in a cardboard or metal tube, even re­duce the size to make it very thin for photo purposes.

You can produce heat higher than 2000° F. with a simple electric furnace which you can build in an hour or so. You will need a cone-type porcelain wire-wound heater replace­ment element, available from hardware and supply stores. Also get a small bag of fiber asbestos or mica pellets, a pound of furnace cement, a small quantity of sand and two lugs similar to those on an electric iron or toaster. You also will need an 8-to-10-inch flowerpot, a heating appliance cord, a foot square of asbestos paper and a crucible cover or fire­brick large enough to cover the top of the porcelain cone. You may also want a pyrometric cone for determining tem­peratures.

Leaving enough room for the appliance cord plug to fit under the rim of the flowerpot, drill two holes near the top of the pot, one under the other, to accommodate the lugs. Should you slip off a bit you can make repairs with the furnace cement. Insert the lugs and tighten the nuts with your fingers. Now attach the appliance cord connector to the lugs. Adjust the lugs until you are able to attach and re­move the connector with reasonable ease. Now fill the hole in the bottom of the flowerpot with furnace cement and patch around the lugs if necessary.

With pliers break off the metal base of the heating ele­ment. A loop of string will keep the coil from sliding off the cone when the outside connection is freed. The string will burn off during the first heating. Place the heating element cone inside the pot, about ¼of an inch below the rim. Pull the center wire from the top of the coil up over the top of the cone and twist it tightly around the upper lug nut with pliers or wrench. If it is not long enough to turn around the nut, stretch it by stealing a bit from the coils. Then at­tach the wire from the bottom end of the coil to the other lug.

If possible, test the continuity of the circuit with a lamp test. In a lamp test you take an electric cord and scrape the covering off each end of its two wires, leaving about one inch of bare wire at the ends. Attach a plug to the two wires at one end for plugging into an outlet later. Connect the other end of one of the wires to one side of a lamp socket. At­tach a third wire to the other side of the lamp socket. Its ends should also be bared. Take the unattached end of this wire and the bare end of the electric cord wire and twist them around the two lugs on your furnace. Now attach the plug to an outlet. When a lamp is placed in the socket, it will light if your circuit has continuity. A faulty connection at the lugs, or a broken heating element, may give you a lot of trouble later, so now is the time to get it right.

For weight, throw an inch or so of the sand into the bot­tom of the pot, then add either the mica pellets or the dry asbestos fiber, packing in well to hold the wire cone in posi­tion. Continue to pack in the asbestos or mica until you have covered all of the resistance wires, but make sure in doing so that the two wires leading to the lugs are kept sepa­rated so that they will not short.

Plug the appliance cord into the circuit to see if the cone heats. Let it heat to redness and particularly watch for any sparking which may be due to moisture. If sparking occurs, disconnect immediately and let your furnace stand for a while before testing again. When you are sure everything is in order, cover the mica filling with a disk cut from the as­bestos paper, with a hole at the center just large enough for a tight fit against the cone. You may have to slit from the edge to the hole to get the asbestos to fit the cone tightly.

Stuff a wad of paper or cloth into the cone to keep out the cement and top it with a crucible cover large enough to go over the cone. Better yet is a block cut from a furnace insulation firebrick. This is soft and can be cut easily with a handsaw. Now fill in the uncovered part of the top with furnace cement, smoothing with a trowel or flat knife. While the material is still soft remove the crucible cover or fire­brick and mold the edges of the opening to give a finished surface. Test to make sure the cover fits back in place. Cracks may develop during drying, but these can be filled with ce­ment. Do not hurry the drying operation by turning on the heat too soon.

All the material which is to be heated in the furnace should be put in small crucibles that will fit into the cone. Do not overload the crucibles and avoid spilling material on the inside of the cone, because it will be difficult to remove when hard.

If desired, a shelf can be raised inside the cone by leveling in some of the cement. From time to time this will have to be repaired because it will crack. Temperatures can be estab­lished through the use of pyrometric cones, which can be obtained from any dealer in ceramic supplies or pottery mak­ing equipment. In so small a unit temperatures achieved can be approximated by noting the amount of time required to reach a given level.

A more advanced project would be a larger electric furnace for high temperatures. Temperatures of more than 2000° F. can be reached in this furnace in less than 2 hours from a cold start. Suited to any experiments dealing with melting ores, metals, metallurgical testing, sintering, heat treatment, reduction, oxidation, determination of ash content, enamels, glazes or any of the many others demanding high heat, this furnace will be found to prove most satisfactory at a cost of less than $10.00, involving work easily done in a single day.

For its construction you will need a case (25) of insulation firebricks; about 10 pounds of high refractory cement; 2 nichrome wire replacement resistors, either 600 watts or, preferably, 1000 watts each; 4 steel studs, ¼ inch in diameter, 6 inches long and threaded at both ends; 8 nuts and steel washers to fit; 2 snap switches; 4 iron wood screws, 3¼ inches long; connecting wire; and pyrometric cones to determine temperature.

Plunge six bricks into a pail of water, one at a time, and re­move almost immediately. Do not let bricks soak up too much water or it will take several weeks of drying before you can put the furnace into operation. These bricks will form the base of the furnace. Set the bricks side by side on a newspaper-covered level surface and cement them together with a thin, even layer of cement.

Place two dry bricks on each side of the furnace and fill in the back with cut bricks. The front will be formed by base, top and side bricks, with a center opening. Do not cement the bricks yet.

The resistance coils will be fitted into grooves inside the furnace on the left, back and right. First mark with a pencil where they are to be placed. The bottom groove will be 1 inch from the floor of the furnace; each of the other 3 should be 1 inch apart. Grooves should start about 2½inches from the front opening and should continue along the back. They should be about ¼inch wide. The left-side grooves should be connected with vertical grooves in the following way: first and second grooves connected at front ends, also third and fourth grooves connected at front ends. All the grooves at the right should have a ¼-inch hole drilled clear through for the steel studs.

An easy way to make the grooves is by using a hack-saw blade held in a wrap-around rag handle. A small chisel or the end of a file may be used as a scraper to clean out the grooves but be careful because the bricks are very soft and easily damaged. Wet the bricks for the sides and back, sprinkle water over the area on which they are to be placed, apply cement to each contacting surface and cement bricks together.

With pliers bend out one or two loops at each end of each resistance coil. The coils can be stretched to fit into the grooves. To determine what length each coil should be, run a piece of light rope in and around the grooves from one stud hole to another. Now thread a washer and nut on a stud and insert the stud into one of the holes on the right. Then add the wire and another washer and tighten on the second nut.

Slide the wire into the first two grooves in the bricks, bend­ing sharply at the corners. Secure the wire in the grooves by long iron U tacks, steel hairpins or, preferably, U pins made by bending strips of wire cut from a broken and discarded resistance coil. The coils can be stretched to fit into the bricks, but guard against shifting. A pin at each corner will suffice. If you have stretched the resistance coil too far for a proper fit, you can squeeze it together again by hand. When near the end of the groove, insert the second stud, attach the other end of the coil to it and add a washer and nut. Re­peat this process with the other coil and the other two studs. Now use a lamp test to check the continuity of both circuits.

Wet six bricks to form the top of the furnace and cement them in place, then cement in filler pieces from cut bricks.

Split a brick lengthwise by sawing across its 4¼-inch face and cut each piece for a snug fit into the front opening. An old saw will cut through the bricks as if they were softest wood. Center these two pieces on two full bricks set flat side by side and mark latter only for drilling holes to accommo­date freely the iron screws. Wet bricks, apply cement to all facing surfaces and screw together, driving screw heads below the surface. Fill the holes with cement and wipe off any sur­plus cement from around the edges.

Allow several days to dry. Connect studs with wires and switches, but be careful to avoid turning the studs or you may disturb connections inside. Turn on the current and watch inside. If sparking occurs between the wire and the walls, disconnect and let the furnace dry for several days more.

When ready to test, drill a 1-inch-diameter peephole through the middle of the door. Cut a plug from a piece of firebrick to fit the hole. A file will shape it quickly, or you can use coarse sandpaper. Put a pyrometric cone into a small lump of clay to hold it on a slant, then press the clay onto a length of firebrick cut so that the cone can be seen through the opening. Heat the furnace until the cone melts. Allow the furnace to cool slowly the first few times.

If this furnace is exhibited at a fair, it should not be main­tained in operation unless the exhibitor can equip it with an automatic cutoff. The heat developed is great enough to melt the resistance wires or severely oxidize the coils. Properly handled, however, the furnace will last a long time. If ele­ments need replacing, the job can be done quickly and inex­pensively.

Building Equipment and Using It

Although a piece of equipment or a scientific instrument you have built makes a good exhibit for a science fair, the real test is not so much the building of the equipment as I what you do with it after you have made it. You may want to start simply by building, but you should go on to use the equipment in an investigation, and then to still more ex­tensive and advanced studies.

Improvising

Some projects give the impression of having cost a great deal or of requiring equipment totally beyond the reach of the average student. But in most instances these projects are dramatic examples of what can be done with imagination, resourcefulness and rather unlikely junk.

It is surprising how many motors from old washing machines, electric fans and similar items have gone through forcible metamorphosis and emerged as scientific equipment. Surplus electronic supplies, such as tubes, wiring, switches, etc., have been bought very inexpensively by many pro-jecteers, who also report that they have discovered all kinds of potentially useful bits and pieces for sale in junk yards or about to be disposed of as scrap by industrial organiza­tions.

One project at the Tenth National Science Fair, an ingen­ious push-button telephone dial system, was constructed from scrap iron, aluminum shutters salvaged from a junk yard, scrap wire from the telephone company and relays found in a junk yard and successfully cleaned up.

The springs from fifty ball-point pens were used in build­ing a computer to solve quadratic equations.

Such items as a tape recorder, Christmas tree lights, old television parts and a rotating flasher were used to build a robot. Incidentally, this was a very accomplished, electroni­cally controlled robot, which talked, moved around and picked up objects by remote control. It also boasted a rotating an­tenna and a halo that lit up when it was especially well be­haved.

If a tour of the attic and basement, local surplus equip­ment suppliers, junk yards and industrial scrap heaps doesn't turn up usable material, try some of the mail-order com­panies that specialize in items of this sort. Some are listed in Chapter 16, and many advertise in newspapers and maga­zines.

Projects for Everyone

In the following chapters you will find descriptions of proj­ects in almost every area of science. You can read through them all, or simply look at those that especially interest you. With the exception of some cutting here and there, these papers are presented just as the students have written them.

Sometimes the papers refer to illustrations and diagrams which do not appear in the book; mention of these has been included to give you an idea of the scope of the projects and the way in which they were reported.

These papers represent varying levels of scientific sophisti­cation and are offered as examples of how some projects have been reported. But they are not models to be copied in detail, for there are many right ways to describe a project, and you will, of course, want to plan yours to fit your own pro­cedures and results.

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