Ideas you may not have considered: An invention is not always a mechanical device...it could be a game (as long as it goes through testing), it could be an improvement on something that already exists. An experiment does not have to be complicated... you could test how music affects a person's ability to throw ping pong balls into a basket (use many people), or how the weather affects the number of birds you hear at a certain time of day. Feel free to use these ideas!
Experiments use a HYPOTHESIS
"If boys and girls are compared, then girls will be better at painting their nails because they began doing this at an earlier age."
(In the above experiment the student might test 20 or more people (10 boys and 10 girls). The quality of the nail painting will be based on evenness of color and amount of paint that gets on the skin/nail left empty. Additionally, each person will be asked when the first time that they painted their nails was. A graph would be made to show the rate of success of each group.)
Inventions use an ENGINEERING DESIGN STATEMENT
Problem
Statement: The water bottle house will keep people warm in the winter when they do not have access to heaters.
Design Statement: The water bottle house will provide a layer of insulation in which air is trapped allowing for less heat loss from the item inside.
Assistants: Mr Hunt and Mrs. Tiday will give advice for design and will assist in the collection of bottles.
Constraints: The materials used must be easily accessible to a homeless person.
(In the above invention, the water bottle house or a smaller replica would be made and then go through multiple tests. The student would place the structure in a refrigerator and measure the temperature inside the structure periodically over a set period a time. The change in temperature would be graphed.)
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Mrs. Tiday