The written presentation will be a concise summary of all the steps of the scientific method you did during your own experiment. This will be depicted on a posterboard. Each part of the scientific method is explained below.

• Problem Statement: This is the question you are going to attempt to answer by designing and then doing an experiment or making observations.
  
• Library Research: This is information you gather about your project so that you can better understand your question. To make your hypotheses, you need to learn something about the question. You need to look in books, magazines, computer databases, do interviews, or get information from anywhere you can so that you can make an educated guess about what you think you will discover when you do your experiment. You need to find at least three references. The following information should be included in your bibliography:
• the author
• name of the book
• year written
• publisher
• pages used
• and the actual information you took from the book.

Hypothesis:A hypothesis is a statement that provides the direction you will take while making your experimental plan to answer your question. It predicts an answer to "why" or "how" something is happening. The hypothesis must be a testable statement. You want to build into your hypothesis the specific variable or variables you will be testing. Here is an example of a hypothesis for an experiment to determine why your car won't start:

"My car won't start because the battery terminals are corroded."


Experimental Plan and Materials: The experimental plan is composed of the exact steps you need to take to complete the experiment to test your hypothesis. You need to write your plan completely enough so that you or anyone else who wants to repeat your experiment can do it exactly the way you did it the first time. An example of a bad experimental plan statement is: "Add some water." You should say: "Add 100ml of water." If you are exact, then someone else will be able to repeat your experiment accurately.

When you do an experiment, you want to be sure that you are testing exactly what you are interested in. Your plan should take into account variables that may alter your results. Here is an example of a variable to control if you were trying to figure out how much faster ice cubes would melt at 100°F than at room temperature. One variable to control would be that there wouldn't be any wind on one cube and not the other, since wind could have some effect on melting rate. Another variable to control would be that both ice cubes would be the same size, since a much smaller ice cube may melt faster. All the conditions should be the same except for what you are specifically testing.

Data and/or Observations: This is the recording of what you see happening while you are doing the experiment. We will work together as a class to learn how to make data tables that help you record your observations easily and understandably. Everything that you see happening must be recorded, whether you think it is "good" data or not. Sometimes what you think is wrong or a mistake turns out to be something very interesting when you see it happen again.

Data Analysis: This is where you look closely at your data to see if there are any patterns or trends that may help you answer your original question. You may have to make a graph or table to help you understand all your data.

Conclusion: For the conclusion, you should answer the following questions:

• Did your data support your hypothesis or not?
• Summarize your results.
• Why do you think your results came out the way they did?
• If you had to do the experiment again, what would you do differently so that you could more accurately answer the question in your problem statement or test your hypotheses?