Excellent Jump-starter for Student Directed Investigations
Community Review for Science Buddies
My Take
Science Buddies is an excellent resource for teachers at all grade levels. Teachers and students can find great ideas for possible science projects or studies as well as basic information about specific science careers. There are resources for teachers to run a science fair and for students to plan their projects. There are several rubric examples for teachers and students to use as well.
How I Use It
I used Science Buddies as a way for students to explore their own interests and connect those to possible science projects or topics that they could use to design their own experiments. Students took the Interest "Survey" which guides them to several different projects and topics that match their answers. This is a great place for students to gather ideas, re-test an experiment that has already been done, or re-design an experiment for them to run themselves. Each experiment has a rating for easy, medium, or hard to do.
I differentiated by encouraging my higher level students to re-design a medium or hard level experiment while allowing my lower level students to re-test or re-design an easy or medium level experiment. There are so many great ideas for teachers and students on Science Buddies, it is a terrific way to get the creative science juices flowing for a fun project!