What effect might pool water have on teeth? Does color change our sense of taste? What kind of vessel would keep an egg safe?
Chicago City Day School students explored these and other questions during the school's annual Science Fair, a noncompetitive exhibition of student projects. Science Fair encourages students to direct their own learning, and it underscores the value of repetition and close observation in scientific inquiry. The event also builds students' public-speaking skills, a key emphasis of City Day's curriculum.
During the weeklong Fair, students in senior kindergarten through sixth grade presented to classmates and parents the results of experiments they'd conducted at home. The students had selected their own topics and developed the experiments themselves. A senior kindergartner, for example, explored wether static electricity could affect her Barbie doll's hair. A third-grader compared the fingerprints of family members to see if they showed any similarities. And a sixth-grader looked at how social media use affected one's mood.
City Day seventh-graders, meanwhile, participated in the traditional Egg Drop, where they designed and built protective crates meant to keep eggs from breaking when dropped from a high distance. It's tougher than it might seem — there were just three egg "survivors" out of 13 drops. The project introduces students to the basic principles of engineering and physics, encouraging them to explore concepts like force and momentum.
Students — with help from their homeroom and science teachers, as well as the school librarian — spent several months working on their projects and their presentations. See images from the Science Fair below.