🌡️ Covers on water in the sun: the whole packet

🌡️ Covers on water in the sun · 3rd–7th grade · 1 day of testing · about $3 · 90 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 what covers the water, then how many degrees the water warms in one hour will ________________, because _____________________________________________

What I think will happen, in my own words:

4 levels × 3 tries at each = 12 tries in all. If anything you keep the same changes, you won't know which change made the difference.

What I need

• 🥛 Clear plastic cups, all the same size: 12, all the same size
• 🚰 Water from the tap
• 🌡️ A thermometer (digital, or the red-liquid kind)
• 🎞️ Clear plastic wrap
• 🥈 Foil
• 🟨 Construction paper: black, white, red, blue and yellow: black
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 🍽️ A baking tray or big plate
• ⏱️ A stopwatch or a kitchen timer
• ✂️ Kid scissors

Be safe: 🌳 Outside · 😎 Never look at the sun

1. Pour the same amount of cool tap water into twelve clear cups, about halfway.
2. Dip the thermometer in one cup and write down the starting temperature.
3. Cut nine wraps big enough to cover a cup's top and sides: three plastic wrap, three foil, three black paper.
4. Wrap three cups in each kind, and tape each wrap down on one side only so you can lift a flap.
5. Leave the last three cups with no cover.
6. Carry all twelve cups on a tray to one sunny spot on the ground, side by side, and start the timer.
7. Never look at the sun: look down at your cups.
8. Every 15 minutes, lift the flap on one cup of each kind, read its water and write it in your log.
9. After one hour, quickly read the water in all twelve cups and write each number down.
10. Take away the starting number to find how many degrees each cup warmed.
11. Find the mean warming for each cover and draw a bar graph.

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

I changed: Cover   I measured: how many degrees the water warms in one hour (degrees)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: cover along the bottom, degrees 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: put the covered cups in the shade as well as the sun, and graph the warming for each cover in both places.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: does a cover keep water in the sun warmer?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing what covers the water would change how many degrees the water warms in one hour, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed what covers the water (No cover, Plastic wrap, Foil, Black paper) and measured how many degrees the water warms in one hour in degrees.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same amount of cool tap water in every cup and the same kind of cup the same, so only what covers the water was different.
5. How many times did you test it? Say something like: 3 times at each of my 4 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: No cover and Black paper 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: put the covered cups in the shade as well as the sun, and graph the warming for each cover in both places.