Developing Alternative Energy Sources on Science Fair Projects


It is no secret that alternative energy sources are receiving a lot of attention right now from the media,  governments, academic institutions and private organizations. However, what you may not realize is that these organizations are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the development of alternative energy source research projects. They even are investing in student and school projects. To help your school and/or students get their share of this research money, help them develop an innovative energy science project.

To help your school and / or students get their share of this research money, develop an innovative energy science project program that promotes renewable energy education in the classroom.

The first step you need to take when developing alternative energy sources on science fair projects is to select an alternative energy source to work with. You have a lot of great resources to choose from. You can choose from solar energy, wind energy, hydro-energy, ocean energy, geothermal energy and biofuel energy.

Next, do your due diligence by getting background information for the project research section of your science fair project. This step is an important component of the scientific method. It involved doing interview with experts in the field as well as finding original research in professional journals and articles in magazines. Be sure to kepp track of your resources because you are going to need to write and include a bibilography with your research report. 

This research will provide you with general information about what your alternative energy source is, how it is generated, how efficient it is and how available it is. During your initial research, you will also want to look for possible project ideas. News stories, professional journal articles and television specials are all great resources for gathering preliminary information.

Step three is to select the main topic for your project. This is the subcategory of your subject. So for alternative enrgy sources the category narrows down like this:

physics - energy- alternative energy

You will need to narrow down your main science concept to make it easier to design an experiment. To narrow down your topic ask questions about the topic that you are interested in. Try to whittle down your topic into a very specific area of concern. For example, if your alternative energy source is solar power, then you can narrow down this topic to focus on what location on Earth gets the most sun exposure, how the angle of the Earth impacts the quality of the solar energy or how solar energy is collected.

Step four is to narrow down your topic to a single hypothesis or question. This is the question that your experiment will be designed to answer. For example, you may ask, "can you generate the same amount of solar energy in winter as you can in the summer?"

While you may think that step five will be to design your own experiment, this is not the best leap to make. Instead, it is a better idea to examine what science experiments have all ready been designed. This serves two purposes. First it will give you ideas about how to design your own experiment, and two it will prevent you from duplicating an experiment that all ready exists.

Step six is to conduct a little more research. This time you will want to focus your science project research on the specific question you want to answer. This research will help you fine tune your hypothesis and it will help you predict what the outcome of the experiment will be.

The final step is to design the experiment for your alternative energy science fair projects. Use all the information that you gathered during the previous steps to create an experiment that will examine your alternative energy source and help you to answer your scientific question or hypothesis.

 

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