Here they are, the four most important things to keep in mind if you want to survive and do well in your science fair.

No. 1: Choose A Topic That Interests YOU!

Hey, it's a simple fact of human nature. People like to do things that interest them, and they hate to spend time slogging away on things they hate. I can't count the times I've heard science fair students tell me that they got stuck doing a project that their teacher thought was interesting, or that a parent though "should" interest them. There's no quicker way to make someone hate science!

It doesn't matter what someone else thinks should interest you. If you want to get a good grade or win your science fair, or ever just not hate the whole experience, then got to pike a topic that interests you.

Fortunately, since science encompasses absolutely everything in the Universe, that shouldn't too hard to do!

Start by asking yourself what you enjoy doing.

Do you enjoy sports? Then let the human body become your intellectual playground. Here are just a few ideas to get you started:

• Why not study how practice at some physical skill (football throwing, pool shooting, running, serving in tennis, etc.) affects performance over time? Can you find any general rules that describes how practice affects performance that covers many different tasks?
• How does exercise alter heart rate and blood pressure? One of my tail-kicking science projects will show you how to build an EKC machine to monitor the electrical activity of the heart at rest and during exercise.
• What visual cues does a baseball player use to figure out where a fly ball is going to land so he can run under it?
• Or, test strategies for playing a particular game you enjoy that could help you or your team win.

Do you enjoy music? Then sound, tonality, esthetics, music preference, performance ability with practice, musical memory (how musicians can memorize sequences of thousands of notes perfectly but not sequences of anything else), audio illusions, electronic music, song lyrics, and on and on are all great subjects for you to explore.

Frankly, it doesn't matter what you like to you do. To turn it into a science project you simply have to start thinking about how people do the thing that you enjoy and you'll find science projects waiting for you in every nook-and-cranny of your interest.

No. 2: Follow the KYSS Principle--Keep Your Science Simple

One of the great universal truths of science that every scientist knows is this--the simpler your experiment is to carry out, analyze, and understand, the more likely you are to succeed. Here are a few tips to keep in mind that will help you keep it simple!

First, make sure you begin with a clearly stated, very straight forward, and very narrow question. Science makes progress by focusing in on the smallest bight-sized questions that to lead to a concrete result. Students often get themselves into trouble right off the bat by asking questions that are confused, complicated or address an issue too broadly.

Here are some good questions:

• What concentration of alcohol is needed to kill 50 percent of the germs on a surface?
• How does heart rate change with aerobic exorcise in a person who is "physically fit."
• How does skin elasticity change with age?
• How does the amount of soot in the atmosphere change when it rains or snows?

Here are a few bad questions that have been sent to my by some of my students.

• How does heat affect different liquids? Too vague. Which liquids? What does "affect" mean exactly? Also, the question is confused. Liquids boil, freeze or break when they reach certain temperatures. Heat and temperature are NOT the same thing. So, correct the confusion and be highly specific: How does the boiling temperature of water vary with concentration of dissolved salt and sugar?
• Which is do people like better, Rap or Classical music? Too broad. Which people? Surely the experimenter doesn't plan to survey every type of person on earth! Solution, be more specific. Which music to teenagers in at Loara High School, in Anaheim California prefer, Rap or Classical?
• Is homosexuality a choice? Too complex, too broad, too politically charged, and inappropriate for a science fair project. Professional scientists have conducted studies that bear on this issue, but such experiments are far beyond the ability of a teenager to organize. Moreover, research like this is far too politically charged. The student who suggested this project had strong feelings about homosexuality, and those feelings would like have colored the student's interpretation of the results. Moreover, some subjects are just not appropriate for science fair venue. So, I seriously recommend that if you want to have a successful and positive science fair experience, stay away from social issues that you have strong feelings about.

Also, when you are designing your experiment, always ask yourself is there a simpler way to get the data, an easier way of understanding the results, a clearer way of presenting your findings, a way to explain them in fewer words. Let "economy in all things" be your motto and you will have a successful project.

No. 3: Do Your Own Work

Remember, when you get to the fair, judges are going to ask you about your project. How can you talk about it if you didn't actually do it yourself? Getting help on a few specific aspects of your project is okay and often necessary. Buy YOU must do project yourself. Don't let a parent or a partner do all the work for you. You won't gain anything, and you will be embarrassed come judging day.

No. 4: Give Yourself Plenty of Time

For your project to be the best you can make it, you must allow yourself plenty of time to get it done. My desperation science fair projects can get you out of a jam, but they are no substitute for a carefully thought through project done with time enough to learn something. A good project can't be done the night before the fair or even a few days before. A good project requires weeks of planning and experimentation to be successful.