News on Science Fair

This is my 14-year-old's science fair project. It won first place at the middle school, where all 8th graders had to complete a project. And it won second place in the physical science category among 8th graders in a four county area. She won $125 for second. But only high school winners go on to the state science fair.

Here's what she did: She put a glow stick in the styrofoam box, and then attached the webcam to the hole she made. She programmed the computer to take photos of the stick once an hour, and she monitored the interior temperature with the indoor/outdoor thermometer.

She used the first, room temp photos to make a scale. She gave values of 1 through 12 based on the brightness of the stick as it burned out.

Then she did the same experiment but put a heating pad in the box and kept the temp at more than 90 degrees. She gave values to the photos based on the room temp scale. She repeated the experiment again with frozen ice packs, keeping the temp around 38 degrees.

Finally, she did it with three different color sticks. All the values were created based on her scale. She drew graphs recording brightness over the course of hours, and discovered that her hypothesis was correct; sticks burned brighter in high temperatures and burned out faster, and the converse in cooler temperatures. Also, different colored sticks burned out at different rates, regard of temp. Although the temp affected all color sticks the same in terms of rate and brightness.

She also read up a little on the chemistry and included that in her presentation. It was a great project. Simple, but revealing. And she was quite rigorous in data collection.