🏎️ Toy cars on different floors: the whole packet

🏎️ Toy cars on different floors · 2nd–6th grade · 1 day of testing · free · 40 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 the floor the car rolls on, then how far the car rolls 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 toy car
• 📚 Some books: 2, about the same thickness
• 📦 Flat cardboard: a long flat piece, about 60 cm
• 🧺 A bath towel
• 🩹 Masking tape, to mark lines
• 📏 A tape measure, or a long ruler

Be safe: ✅ Nothing sharp, hot or small

1. Lean the cardboard on two books to make a ramp on the bare floor.
2. Put a strip of masking tape across the ramp near the top: that's your start line.
3. Put the car's front wheels on the line and let go. Don't push!
4. When it stops, measure from the bottom of the ramp to the front of the car.
5. Write the number in your table, then do two more tries from the same line.
6. Set the ramp on a carpet the same way and do three tries.
7. Lay a folded bath towel flat, set the ramp on it the same way, and do three tries.
8. Find the middle distance for each floor and draw a bar graph.

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

I changed: Floor   I measured: how far the car rolls (cm)

MY GRAPH (a bar graph: floor along the bottom, cm 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: run all three floors from a 1-book ramp and from a 3-book ramp, and draw a bar for each pair.

1. What made you want to ask this question? Say something like: I wanted to know: which floor slows a toy car the most?
2. What did you think would happen, and why? Say something like: I thought changing the floor the car rolls on would change how far the car rolls, and I wrote down why.
3. What did you change, and what did you measure? Say something like: I changed the floor the car rolls on (Bare floor (tile or wood), Carpet, A bath towel) and measured how far the car rolls in cm.
4. What did you keep the same, and why does that matter? Say something like: I kept the same car and the same ramp, 2 books high the same, so only the floor the car rolls on 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: Bare floor (tile or wood) and A bath towel 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: run all three floors from a 1-book ramp and from a 3-book ramp, and draw a bar for each pair.