🔦 Flashlight shadows: the whole packet

🔦 Flashlight shadows · kindergarten · 1 day of testing · free · 25 minutes a sitting

My days, if the fair is 14 days away

Count back from your fair day and write in each date. Fewer days than this? The jobs share days, in this order; nothing is skipped.

Dates from my teacher

• My question is due
• Testing starts
• My results table and graph are due
• My board is due

In this packet

1. 🗓️ My project plan
2. 💭 My hypothesis
3. 🧺 Change, measure, keep the same
4. 🪜 My steps
5. 📊 My results
6. 📓 My logbook
7. ✅ My conclusion
8. ✂️ Board titles to cut out
9. 🏅 The judge's questions and my certificate

If I change how close the flashlight is, then how many crayons wide the shadow is will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

3 levels × 3 tries at each = 9 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🔦 A flashlight
• 🚗 A toy car: a toy to make the shadow
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines: three marks on the floor
• 🖍️ Crayons or markers: a box of the same size
• 📄 Paper
• 🩹 Tape

Be safe: ✅ Nothing sharp, hot or small

1. Stand the toy on the floor near a wall, in a room with the lights off.
2. Your grown-up puts three tape marks on the floor: far, middle and close.
3. Hold the flashlight on the far mark and shine it at the toy.
4. Lay crayons end to end across the shadow on the wall, and count them.
5. Your grown-up writes the number down. Do it two more times.
6. Shine it from the middle mark three times, and the close mark three times.
7. Colour a box for every crayon. Where was the shadow biggest?

Write each number in your results table the moment you measure it.

I changed: Flashlight   I measured: how many crayons wide the shadow is (crayons)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: flashlight along the bottom, crayons up the side)

What I noticed: ______________________________________________

Write something every day you work on it, even the days you only gather things. More days? The three-page logbook prints from peabody.kids/science-fair/templates/logbook.

My hypothesis was ☐ right ☐ partly right ☐ not right.

I know because my numbers show:

What surprised me, or what might have gone wrong (7th and up):

Next time I would test:

Idea: Change a second thing: move the toy closer to the wall and farther from it, with the flashlight in one place.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: does a toy's shadow get bigger when the flashlight comes closer?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing how close the flashlight is would change how many crayons wide the shadow is, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed how close the flashlight is (Far away, In the middle, Close up) and measured how many crayons wide the shadow is in crayons.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same toy and the toy in the same place the same, so only how close the flashlight is was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 3 levels, and I found the middle number.
6. What did you find out? Show me in your numbers. Say something like: Look at my table: Far away and Close up gave different numbers, and here's the pattern.
7. Was your hypothesis right? How do you know? Say something like: My numbers show whether I was right, partly right or not, and I can show you where.
8. Did anything go wrong, or surprise you? Say something like: One try was odd, so I did it again and wrote it in my logbook.
9. If you did it again, what would you change or test next? Say something like: I'd change a second thing: move the toy closer to the wall and farther from it, with the flashlight in one place.