Science Fair Experiment Sitemap

01. A SCIENTIST - It would be hard to imagine a more exciting time than now to be choosing a future! The greatest adventures and the bravest dreams of this Age of Space are still to be realized— and you can decide to join the exploring parties. You even may lead a new adventure of your own.

There is still time to get ready. There is time to find out where you fit and to train yourself to make the most of whatever abilities you may have. There is time, too, to dis­cover that the scientific community has a good many roads leading to it and a truly magnificent variety of architecture to choose from once you get there.

02. THE "HOW" - 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.

• Decide on the specific problem or process you want to investigate.
• 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.

03. BOTANY - Joanne Zerger, Salina, Kansas, presented her project, "Showing Phosphorus Uptake by Autoradiography," at the Ninth National Science Fair.

"Finding uses for radioactive isotopes as tracer elements is one of the newest fields in which research is being done today. It is an extremely important field, and I have certainly found it to be one of the most interesting.

04. CHEMISTRY - In the course of developing a process for the production of magnesium, James C. Hartman of Fort Wayne, Indiana, became interested in the great possibilities of titanium. Learn­ing that the high cost of producing titanium was due to the complicated decomposition process, he decided to investigate the possibilities of producing titanium by a cheaper method. His project, "Electrolytic Decomposition of Titanium Diox­ide," was exhibited at the Ninth National Science Fair.

05. ELECTRONICS - "EMAG III, a Checker-playing Digital Computer," was the name of the project presented by finalist David S. Ecklein, Cedar Falls, Iowa, at the Tenth National Science Fair.    ,.;

"Introduction ,

My project, a digital computer programed to play a reason­able game of checkers with a human as its adversary, is the logical culmination of a previous active interest in electronics and symbolic logic. Its conception dates back to the summer of 1957 and since then has been the focal point of my efforts and aspirations. The project has in its entirety been developed in my home laboratory.

06. ENTOMOLOGY - This is an excerpt from the project "The Effects of Tempera­ture on the Toxicity of Insecticides," presented by finalist Bill Boyer of Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the Ninth National Science Fair.

"In the investigation for this project I exposed insects to definite dosages of insecticides for twelve hours to determine if varied temperatures would effect the toxicity of the insecti­cides used

07. GEOLOGY - Sonia Ruth Anderson of Omaha, Nebraska, a winner in the Sixteenth Science Talent Search, wrote a report on seven years of "fooling around" with her fossil collection. It was called "The Collection, Study and Classification of Some Eastern Nebraska Fossils."

"In the autumn of 1950, I began to collect, study and clas­sify numerous eastern Nebraska fossils. My objective was to determine some of the organisms which existed here during prehistoric times and to learn something about them. I've gathered my entire collection, except for the Pliocene speci­mens, by myself

08. MATHEMATICS - Number theory, statistical biology and game theory are some of the branches of mathematics that Science Talent Search winner John N. Mather of Princeton, New Jersey, enjoys exploring. His project report, "Nine Postulates for Euclidean Geometry," was part of his winning entry in the Nineteenth Science Talent Search. John's very thorough paper has been abstracted here.

09. MEDICAL SCIENCES - Barbara Conway of Chattanooga, Tennessee, did a project on "Experimental Teratology" which won an American Medical Association award at the Tenth National Science Fair. Then she was invited by Dr. Hans Selye, world au­thority on stress as a basic cause of disease, to work during the following summer in his laboratory at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal. Not only was she the first American to have such an opportunity, but she was permitted to perform surgery herself.

10. PHYSICS - Mary-Dell Matchett, Hinsdale, Illinois, decided that tele­scope making should not be an exclusively male province. Here is a report of her ambitious project, "Construction of an Eight-Inch Cassegrainian Telescope," which helped her to become one of the top forty winners in the Fifteenth Science Talent Search.

11. SPACE SCIENCES - "A Method of Obtaining a Complete Balance of Life within a Closed System" was the ingenious project of Richard P. Bentley of Tupper Lake, New York. It was exhibited at the Tenth National Science Fair.

"The following is a report on the method by which I propose to maintain a complete balance of life ecology within a closed system.

12. ZOOLOGY - A long-time interest in collecting, identifying and studying the geographic range of mollusks led a Maryland boy, Frank Wayne Grimm of Catonsville, first to sharing his questions and specimens with the curators of the Smithsonian Institu­tion in Washington, D.C., and then to writing a thoroughgo­ing report on six snails he discovered in the Maryland Piedmont, far from their normal habitat in the mountains of Pennsylvania.

13. STUDENT PROJECTS - To illustrate the thousands of interesting projects that can be done with great success by even the youngest students in grade school, two sample lists are reproduced here. The first is a list of science fair projects prepared by the Texas Pan­handle Science Fair, Amarillo, Texas

14. FRONTIER RESEARCH - At least part of the reason people are drawn to careers in science is the now nearly unique opportunity to explore un­mapped territory where anything may happen.

Apparently the human spirit, especially the young human spirit, harbors a great longing to venture into mystery, to struggle with it and to emerge with sketch maps and a pocket­ful of samples

15. COMPETITION - Let's suppose you have finished polishing a satisfying piece of work. Or it might be more realistic to suppose that you have reached a natural stopping point where it becomes evident that new thinking, planning and equipment may be necessary before you can go any further.

16. INFORMATION FILE - These lists represent a rather random sampling of the thou­sands of excellent books available. For every title mentioned, a dozen others come immediately to mind.

With the great upsurge of interest in science, new publica­tions are being produced constantly. These samples are in­tended chiefly as clues that will lead to others by the same author and by other authors in each of the classifications.

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