•Science is a way of thinking about the world around us. It’s a way of getting answers to questions. It’s a way to solve a problem. Some people call it a method:

•In the old days people got answers to their questions in several ways. They asked an “expert”. Or they checked in a book. Or they believed in magic. Today we know that we don’t need these.

•What we need is a and the curiosity to find an .

Scientist have to take the time to think logically

when they are investigating a question or

problem.

They break things down into many steps that make

sense.

The next slides will explain the steps.

•First Scientists come up with a “big” Question and they try to discover the answer to the question. “Why” questions are sometimes too hard to test so finding answers to them may be more difficult.

•Then they begin to gather information to help them learn the answer to their question. (Research)

•The next step is to form a Hypothesis. This is a possible explanation for what causes something to occur. It is NOT A RANDOM GUESS!! You must state the hypothesis in a way that can be measured. You should use the “If”, “then” format. Ex: “If (I do this), then (this) will happen.”

You should only change one thing (variable) in your experiment.

•The next step for a scientist is to test the hypothesis. You will need to think up an Experiment. (This is the procedure.) It is important for your experiment to be a fair test. You do this by making sure that you change only one factor at a time while keeping all other conditions the same.

•We need to record the Data we are going to collect. Keeping Science Journals helps us to record our information. We need to gather information or data and document it so it is readable and makes sense to others.

•Scientists Observe what happens and write it down. This is an important key to conducting experiments.

Once a scientist completes an experiment, they often repeat it to see if they get

the same findings and results.

•The last step in the Scientific Process is the Conclusion in which we communicate our

results. You will share the results to others in a report or science journal.

•Scientists share their experiments and findings with others.