Magnet science fair projects: why not, and what to try instead

The rule

🔊 No magnets in a fair project. Magnets are small and strong. If a small child swallows two, they can pull together inside the body, through the walls of the gut, and hurt it badly. The Workshop's own safety line says "Magnets stay glued in. Never put one in your mouth.", and a loose magnet never goes to a builder below 6th grade.

A fair project means magnets loose on a table, in a school bag and in a house with little ones, so the fair's safe-list leaves out everything with a magnet, at every grade.

Sources: Peabody's Workshop safety rules for magnets, after the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Your school's sheet wins. The rules in plain words has every shared rule with its source, and Is my project OK? checks an idea of your own.

Why, and what to do instead

Magnets are one of the most fun things to test, so it's a shame to leave them out. But a fair project isn't one magnet glued safely inside a toy. It's a handful of loose ones, carried to school in a bag, set out on a display table and brought home again, and every one of those is a chance for a small one to end up in a little hand, then a mouth. So Peabody leaves magnets off the fair's list for every grade, even though the Workshop allows a magnet glued into a build.

What a magnet does is push or pull without touching, and these projects test other pushes and pulls instead. A rubbed balloon picks up bits of paper with static, which pulls without touching too. A pendulum swings because gravity keeps pulling it back toward the middle. A rubber band pulls back harder the more you stretch it, and a ruler on a pencil balances when the weight on each side is just right. Every one changes one thing, measures one thing and does it three times. If your school's fair does allow magnets, ask your teacher first, and keep every magnet where little ones can't reach it.