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  Creating a science fair project can be a fun, interesting and challenging activity that can teach students how the scientific method works. By doing a little planning and research, students can put together a science fair experiment that is informative and shows considerable thought and hard work.
  
  

Does your breakfast cereal measure up?

• An easy experiment to do that involves something most people already have in the kitchen is the cereal test. If possible, get your science teacher to let you do this with the whole class; otherwise you will need several friends or family members to volunteer. You will need to buy three or four brands of the same type of cereal along with one or two generic brands as well. Place one of the brands of each kind of cereal in separate cups and let them soak in milk for one minute. Have each participant taste each brand and rate them according to taste, texture and appearance. Develop a survey with a standard scale that they can use to rate the cereals. For example, you can use a scale of one to ten with ten being the best rating. To further add more validity to your analysis you can also do a cost analysis of each cereal to determine how each compares to how well it did on the taste test.
  
  

The Dog's Water Taste Test

• Fill two separate bowls with four to eight cups of water, one with tap water and the other with filtered non-chlorinated water. Make sure both bowls have the same amount of water. Set these bowls in a place where your dog does not normally drink so that it will not drink out of one bowl simply out of habit. Remove any other water bowls so that your dog will drink from one of these bowls instead. Form a hypothesis and each day for two weeks record the amount of water consumed by your dog from each bowl. Report on whether or not the smell of chlorine and other substances in the tap water may have influenced your dog's decision to drink out of one bowl over another.
  
  

Cleaning Up an Oil Spill

• An experiment of great importance that will help you understand the difficulty in cleaning up an oil spill is quite simple to do. Fill three separate containers, such as a large plastic mixing bowl, with water. Pour a small amount of motor oil into each of the three containers. The exact amount is unimportant, but try to make the amount similar for each bowl. Use three separate methods for attempting to clean up the oil. First try the simple method of trying to scoop it off the top of the water with a spoon. Record your results and then try another method. For a second method you can try mixing a small amount of sand or kitty litter into the water to see if it will absorb the oil so that you vacuum it out of the bottom of the bowl. Thirdly, try straining the water through a piece of cheesecloth to see if the cloth will absorb the oil. Again, record your results and report.