ZAPATA ACADEMY SCIENCE FAIR

You might come up with your experiment hypothesis or design need before your research. Or you might come up with your experiment hypothesis or design need after you've done your research. Either method is "ok".  Use the link below for more help.

EXPERIMENT: A hypothesis is an "educated guess"; so better hypothesis are usually finalized after research has been done. Edit your hypothesis after doing research if you chose to write one before.

DESIGN:  Instead of stating a question, state a need. Can you describe in detail a problem that your design will solve? Has a real world problem or need been defined and a prediction made?

The hypothesis must be worded so that it can be tested in your experiment. Do this by expressing the hypothesis using your independent variable (the variable you change during your experiment) and your dependent variable (the variable you observe-changes in the dependent variable depend on changes in the independent variable). In fact, many hypotheses are stated exactly like this: "If a particular independent variable is changed, then there is also a change in a certain dependent variable."

• A hypothesis is an educated guess about how things work.
• Most of the time a hypothesis is written like this: "If _____[I do this] _____, then _____[this]_____ will happen because ___________." (Fill in the blanks with the appropriate information from your own experiment.)
  
  
• Your hypothesis should be something that you can actually test, what's called a testable hypothesis. In other words, you need to be able to measure both "what you do" and "what will happen."

 from -www.sciencebuddies.org