The Scientific Method

I posted a picture of Annabel’s science project on Instagram and a few people asked if she could explain what it was. And since I seem to be incapable of completing a blog post lately (I have so many that I’ve started…working full-time is hard on my brain), I thought I’d let her take this one!

Hi, everyone! This is Annabel.

I’ve gone to the science fair every year and it looked so cool so I decided, “hey, why don’t I do that?”

For my experiment, I decided to use ferrofluid. I learned about ferrofluid when we went to Disney World. We were at a restaurant when this guy came over to our table and showed us some science tricks, and one of them included ferrofluid. When he showed that one to us I was like, “Say Whaaaaaaaa?”

I did a bunch of reading about it when I got home and watched some YouTube videos about it too. Ferrofluid is a magnetized fluid NASA invented in 1963 so they could move rocket fuel around in outer space. Outer space has no gravity so the ferrofluid is mixed with the fuel. Cool, right?

When I got the ferrofluid I had to wear blue gloves to put it in the container because it is sort of dangerous and you’re not supposed to touch it or breathe it in. I loved wearing the gloves, especially because afterward I blew them up like balloons!

For my experiment, my hypothesis was that the stronger magnets would have a larger effect on the ferrofluid than the weaker magnets. My dad and I tested four magnets of different strengths by moving them up and down the glass and observing what happened to the ferrofluid. We also experimented to see how many napkins you could wrap around the magnets and still have them affect the ferrofluid. The weakest one stopped working wrapped in only two napkins, but the strongest one still worked wrapped in 13! We almost used all the napkins we had! Anyway, this showed my hypothesis was right!

On the day of the science fair I was so excited. There were older kids there from older schools, like college! They did really cool science projects to show us! The coolest one was where they taught us how to make elephant toothpaste which I loved because my favorite animal is an elephant! I made mine purple! The older kids had cool presentations but mine was better, hee hee hee!

When people came around to look at my project, I was nervous talking to them about it. But once I did it a few times I felt braver. And then, when more and more people came over, I felt famous. Everyone thought my project was so cool and they had a lot of questions. All of my grandparents were there to see it, too, and that made me really happy! I was sad when it was over.

The next day at school the whole school came through and I got to show everyone my project! My friend Lucas did fruit batteries, which were pretty awesome. I’m thinking about being a scientist when I grow up, so I’m glad I did this!