Something New and Never Seen

Have you ever thought how a science fair shakes and works our brain? When I was in third grade, I decided to be part of the science fair for the first time. Basically, you had to be in third grade to do it, and I was very interested in it.

After I got permission from my parents to sign up for the science fair, I started thinking about the projects that I could do. I wanted to do a project that was easy to do but interesting and not really ever seen much (not like the classic volcano, mind you), so I decided that my project would be something about ice.

My journey about deciding on my topic did not end there. I had to figure out what can melt ice the fastest without focusing on what everyone knows; for example, the way salt melts the ice quickly. My final topic was to experiment what melts ice the fastest among salt, sugar and soap. Was I going to innovate? No idea! I didn’t even know the word innovate yet. The hypothesis was “Salt melts ice the fastest.”

On the day of the science fair, I was ready for the presentation, if that is what you call it. I am pretty sure I was all dressed up and ready for the event and excited, too. At school, the schedule was slightly different. We learned a little bit, and then my teacher said that anyone participating in the science fair should go to the gym to explain their project and get judged. We were also advised to bring a book with us, so we would read when we were not getting judged. There were three people who were judging us, and once you were judged, you would go back to your classroom.

When I was there, I sat down and read for most of the time watching others being judged. Finally, someone came to judge me, and I stood up and talked about my project. After that I sat back down and went back to reading. By then a lot of kids were done with their presentations and were already judged by three people.

I was just worried about doing a good job presenting my science fair project. For some reason some of the teachers had to get two more judges to come judge my work. I wondered why and I guessed my project didn’t look interesting because I had chosen to do work on an easy topic. In the end, I got a good score even though a lot of kids didn’t come to see my project but I still liked that day.

You might be curious about the end results of the project, and whether or not my hypothesis was verified. According to my experiment, what melted ice the fastest between soap, sugar and salt was SUGAR. To be honest, the results were unexpected. Will we ever have enough sugar to use in ice melting? Future innovations might answer this intriguing question.