Science Fair Projects

This is a great time for kids to share about the Creator God!

Science projects usually stay safely inside the circle of neutral science because you’re supposed to do experiments to test your ideas. At the same time, there are some areas people who’ve only heard of Evolutionary and Uniformitarian ideas won’t even think of doing.

So, what kinds of things could you focus on to help people think outside the box?

Answers in Genesis has a collection of 6 experiments for science fairs as well.

Both pages list projects you don’t have to wait to try out. Plus, it’s fun just reading these cool projects!

The tricky part of coming up with a plan is figuring out a way to demonstrate the ideas you’re talking about. You aren’t allowed to just make up stories. This works well for Creationists since we can test catastrophes and show how dependent life is on a whole structure. But, no one can go back and take videos of the past; there will always be faith involved in how you think we got here (until heaven, anyway!).

Let’s think about some important areas we can test:

Did you know very few people outside of science geeks know about soft tissue in dinosaur bones? It can be very eye-opening to realize skin, proteins, and even DNA are still intact in fossils “millions of years” old.

I doubt you can get your hands on a real fossil and the equipment you would need to find if it had organic remains in it. But, you CAN do an experiment showing how fragile DNA, proteins, and collagen are.

This is your project, but here are some search terms to get started:

• preserve extracted DNA
• preserve protein powder
• science fair project + mummification

Symbiosis is great evidence for Creationism. Many creatures supposed to have evolved “millions of years” apart must have each other around to survive. The most famous are pollinators and flowers. Answers in Genesis has a long article with great examples.

Now, you just have to figure out a pollination project to go along with it. Or, you could think of your own symbiotic relationship where one partner was supposed to show up only after “millions of years”.

What about geology? Mount St. Helens has given us real world examples of erosion and sedimentation Uniformitarians can’t match.

I bet you could have fun figuring out an experiment using dirt, rocks, sand, and water. Our family lived right next to a new gravel/sand parking lot on a slope. It didn’t take too many storms to carve out a canyon through their carefully rolled smoothness. And, if you followed the canyon to its end, you found the piled up sediment where the water slowed down.

Uniformitarians have no problem with water-carried dirt. They just don’t want to look beyond the amounts we see happening today to the continent-wide layers we find across the planet.

You don’t even have to live near a high erosion area to study this one. Science Buddies has done the work to plan out an experiment using sand and corn meal! It’s not something you can do on your kitchen counter, but I bet the results would be spectacular!

You could also pull in some technology, because Google Earth Helps Us Picture Noah’s Flood!

It would be really cool to show the limits of change in living things since this is one of the biggest areas of faith for an Evolutionist. We know creatures can adapt to new environments, but we’ve never seen a creature turn into something totally unrecognizable.

The important thing to focus on if you do this kind of project is what’s going on in genetics. Evolutionists have to have things developing new genes to do new things. We know God made everything very good after its kind and things have been falling apart since then.

Every time we study changes in living things, we find it’s because of shared DNA, loss of DNA, or a pre-programmed way to handle change. It is never because of newly developed DNA. Unfortunately, information about all this tends to be hard to understand. Even though the ideas are easy, you might want to save this for when you can wade through scientific papers for yourself or have a science-minded grownup help.

I’m not sure what you could do for an experiment since raising 1,000s of generations of fruit flies isn’t very practical. In fact, unless you have some very different pets of the same kind, you probably would want to stick with plants.

• You could bring in your mom’s miniature rose (or give it to her when you’re done) and have pictures of a giant climbing rose
• Do you know a gardener who grows heirloom veggies? The difference between a cherry and a beefsteak tomato is pretty great, but there’s both tomatoes!
• Or, you could get one of those fancy purple potatoes at the grocery store to compare with today’s more common white one
• Just about anything showing a large difference between members of the same family could work for this project!

I’m sure this is just the tip of the iceberg for ideas. Let me know what you’ve done for your projects and keep an eye on this page for more updates (if you are on facebook, I’ll be sure to post about them).

Holy, holy, holy, is the LORD of hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory. Isaiah 6:3