3rd grade science project

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bobbbm

Premium Member
My 8 year old daughter (going on 30) Wants to do her science project on a fish tank or something to do with a fish tank... I cant imagine why :P


I was thinking of getting her a nano cube or something really small that she can use after it's all done. Can something be setup for around $150- $200?

I was going to tell her we can do it on the tank cycle but these are the questions she has to hand in about the project

Objective-What I intend to accomplish with this project.

Hypotheisi What I thought would happen

Procedure-What I did to prepare for this project

Conclusion-WHat I learned


Now we can answer the bottom 3 but if we did something like a tank cycle have no idea what to put for Objective. Thanks in advance :)
 
First thing that comes to mind is to observe the ANN cycle. Set up the nano tank with some like rock. Teach her how to use the test kits and record the ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate levels every day, or every few days. Hopefully when she's done she will be able to conclude that the ammonia turns to nitrite, which turns into nitrate.
 
Sounds like an expensive project. Becareful letting here handle the chemicals for test regents. Maybe just some test strips would be safer.

Another way to go - aka cheaper. The effect of light on coral expantion. Get a couple of 2-3 round inch frag disks and put some xenia, gsp, or zoas on each one. One disk put in full light the other one shaded. Take weekly measurements of expantion on disk.
 
If you choose the original idea, you might want to make it an experiment, so that you have a second batch of water under different conditions - lets say with no rockor light or something, and see how the rock (the independent variable) affects the dependent variable (eg cycle time) The objective might be to determine whether the addition of live rock or light decreases or increases the cycling time.
I like the coral expansion idea too.
 
Sounds like a great project. Have you asked your daughter what she thinks the objective should be? Creating a healthy marine environment can be a very worthwhile goal for an 8 year old. Nanos are expensive, though. What about a small tank? You could use it as a QT later. Good luck with it and have fun!
 
Haha, If your willing to spend the money and she's going to keep it afterwards it could be worthwhile. Like Dre was hinting at, you just have to try to remember that it is HER project, I would just make sure she's actually learning something. I like the test strip idea, something that she could do herself safely. Good luck, let us know how it goes
 
Objective- To creating and establishing an environment to help prorogate live corals to reduce the removal of organisms from our natural reefs.

Hypotheisi- Start with tank grown corals, xenia and other soft corals. have them grow and reproduce in a captive environment.

Procedure- Tell the steps she had to take to reproduce the stable environment for the corals to grow.

Conclusion- That’s the fun part.
 
I like shyland's idea a lot--but why not make it easy on her and do the ANN cycle in a FW tank? You could easily do two tanks as Neuro suggested (or one tank and one tupperware of water). So you have one tank, add one fish, measure water params daily using strips. measure same params daily in tupperware container of water, no fish.

It's got eveything--hypotheseis, experiment, conclusion...
 
if you do the nano tank it will be easy to make a graph as the cylce progress'. should impress the teacher and get her a good grade.
 
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