There are a number of skills that you need to learn that will be required for all science fair projects. Most people think of doing the experiment and making a cool display board, and that is all well and good, but there are other skills that kids need to learn and get to be pretty good at in order to have a successful science fair experience.

One of those skills is to learn how to ask questions. You first ask general questions when looking for a topic, and they get for specific when you get your project. Once you have your project, you need to get the official question that will be the core of the project. Are you looking for differences between? Or are you looking for how much time? It might be a what will happen when you ? Your whole experiment will be organized around answering that question.

Another skill that you must master is using spreadsheets to keep track of the data and creating cool charts and graphs to give a visual picture of your results. Kids pick this up at school as they have kids making spreadsheets pretty early on. Learning how to get the columns set up and any formulas will be something that becomes more important as the students head to middle and high school. Unless you have a project that comes with a built in spread sheet, someone will need to know how to do a merge.

Writing a good summary is another skill that is involved with all science fair projects. Writing a scientific summary is slightly different than a chapter summary for a book. There are certain templates that need to be followed. They like just the facts and not a whole loft of glowy language that Language Arts teachers go for. This will not be a long research report, but a quick summary that explains the conclusions you came up with based on the data you collected. Other writing you need is to write step by step directions for your procedures. Again it needs to be short and sweet, but complete. Often these will be put on a power point presentation. Most school science fair projects have one whole section of the grading on how well the written portion is done.

The final skill to be developed will be with the oral presentation. Often it is simple, just explaining what you did while standing in front of your display, but as you get older being able to give an oral report, without notes on your project will be expected. Memorizing, using talking points, becoming comfortable standing in front of a group of people will be part of the package.

You can have some fun with all science fair projects as you do the experiments, but you still need to master some of the nitty-gritty details in order to end up with the best science fair project possible.