Baylor College
Microbes Are Everywhere
In a nutshell, your class will culture bacteria from their choice of surfaces. You will need to prepare or purchase agar plates. If you are new to this classic biology activity, this resource carefully walks you through the process of...
Listening Library
The Sign of the Beaver
Extend a class reading of the novel The Sign of the Beaver across all subject areas with this literature unit guide. From basic discussion questions and writing prompts, to a research project about tracking animals, this...
Curated OER
Implications of the Human Genome Project
Students study the Human Genome Project through classroom discussion and the video, Cracking the Code of Life. They research reports about the issues of disease, human health, and the ethical, legal, and societal implications of the...
Curated OER
Air: Air Quality Picture Project
Students recognize which activities contribute to poor air quality and which contribute to good air quality. They discover how air quality is measured, and come up with ways that humans can have a positive affect on air quality.
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Project Ideas: Don't Get Burned: Uv Index Throughout the Day
Sun tanning has a bad rap right now. Use a personal ultraviolet monitor to measure the UV index to prevent getting a sunburn. With this science fair project you will create a chart showing the UV ray measurement at different times of the...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Think Fast: Do Video Game Players Have Faster Reaction Time
Are you an avid video game player? Do you think this helps you have fast reaction times? This Science Buddies science project lays out an experiment to help you test your hypothesis. The Science Buddies project ideas are set up...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: How Food Supplements Affect Weight Gain of Juvenile Mice
As your mom and dad always tell you, a healthy diet is important to good health. This project is designed to see what happens to mice when they are allowed to load up on sugary snacks. Do you think that they will gain excess weight? Do...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Mapping Troposhperic Ozone Levels Over Time
Ozone in the stratosphere protects the earth by absorbing harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun. However, when ozone occurs in the troposphere, it is harmful to health. In this project you can use data from EPA monitoring stations...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: The Perfect Marriage of Computer Science & Medicine
Find out the real explanation for why your parents are so weird. Here is a project that lets you explore the internet to find out why your "DNA blueprint" is so important to health and disease. In this project you will use methods that...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Using Daphnia to Monitor Water Toxicity
In a bioassay, a living organism serves as a detector for toxins-the same way canaries were used in coal mines to detect invisible toxic gases. In this project, water fleas (Daphnia magna), a freshwater crustacean, are used in a bioassay...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: I Love Ice Cream, but It Doesn't Love Me: Lactose Intolerance
Pizza, milk shakes, and ice cream sundaes all contain dairy products, therefore they cannot be eaten by the majority of people around the world. Dairy products contain the sugar molecule lactose, and the majority of people on the planet...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Heart Health: How Does Heart Rate Change With Exercise?
Your heart starts beating before you are born and keeps right on going through your whole life. Over an average lifetime, the human heart beats more than 2.5 billion times. Keeping your heart healthy means eating right, not smoking, and...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: A Day in the Life of Your Heart
Heart rates can be determined by the amount of physical activity your body is engaging in. The more physically active you are, the faster your heart beats. You can measure the rate your heart is beating by taking your pulse. This science...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: The Nose Knows Smell but How About Taste?
As if sniffles and clogged sinuses are bad enough, everything seems to taste bland and flavorless when we are sick. Gather up a few volunteers, hit the kitchen, and try this experiment to find out if there is really truth to the idea...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Deep Knee Bends: Measuring Knee Stress With a Mechanical Model
Prosthetic limbs and artificial joints can help people with disease or injury lead a normal life. Sports medicine or physical therapy is also an area that relates to this experiment. Either way, this project serves as a good match if any...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Measuring Your Threshold of Hearing
How your ears and your brain turn the sound waves out there in the world into the experience of music in your head, remains a mystery to many, but yet we all experience and even enjoy sounds and music. If you're interested in doing a...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Twirls, Whirls, Spins, & Turns: Reflexes & Dizziness
Tilt-A-Whirls, Merry-Go-Rounds, Spinning Tea Cups. Just the thought of these rides is enough to make someone dizzy, or queasy. Learn about spins, turns, and the mixed signals that fire in our brains when the sensation of dizziness takes...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Puppy Proportions: Growth Spurts & Weight Gain in a Dog
Puppies prove to be a fun and useful aid in this adorable experiment! By having access to, and measuring a puppy's body dimensions over a period of weeks or months, you can discover if segments of canine anatomy develop at different...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Effects of Exercise: Changes in Carbon Dioxide Output
Everybody knows that your body needs oxygen to keep going, and that you breathe out carbon dioxide as waste. What happens when you exercise? You've probably noticed that you breathe faster, and your heart beats faster. What triggers your...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: It's Crowded in Here! A Study of Plant Population Density
Like humans, plants can be negatively affected by overcrowding. Unlike humans, plants cannot get up and move to a new environment or explore how to utilize new resources. This experiment will explore the effects of crowding (population...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Do You Have the Willpower to Taste Something Sour?
Do try this mouth-puckering science fair project to find out if people of all ages love sour tastes, or if there a difference between the sour preferences of kids and adults. You might be able to sell creations of your own based on your...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Old Salty: Does Age Affect the Ability to Detect Salt?
Sauerkraut, pickled fish, pickled vegetables, kimchi, corned beef, processed cheeses, smoked lunch meats. Do you like these high-salt foods? What about your grandparents, do they? Do your grandparents seem to like most foods to be a bit...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: How Does Soil Affect the P H of Water?
Did you know that soils can be alkaline, neutral, or acidic? Most plants grow best in soil near neutral pH, but some plants prefer slightly acidic and others slightly alkaline soil. What is the pH of the soil in your garden? What happens...
Science Buddies
Science Buddies: Heavy Metals and Aquatic Environments
You might know that lead can be toxic, and that you can get lead poisoning from eating or inhaling old paint dust. Lead is called a heavy metal, and there are other sources of heavy metals that can be toxic, too. Silver, copper, mercury,...