Science Projects to End the School Year

Here are some engaging science projects to end the school year in your middle school science class:

Consumer Product Testing Project

This is a student-centered experimental design project for which students will determine the most superior brand out of 3 to 4 brands of a product of their choice (for example: Bounty, Scott, Brawny, and store-brand paper towels). To determine superiority, students will design three experiments that each test a different parameter of the products. This project is SO much fun for students and lets them use the inquiry and measuring skills they’ve gleaned through the school year. Check out this blog post to learn more!

Science Careers T-Shirt Project

Host a Science Career Fashion Show! Students research and science career (huge lists of careers are included!) and design a t-shirt to showcase their chosen career. This project really gets the students excited to learn about their chosen career and to try to make their T-shirt unique and beautiful!

Plastic in the Oceans Mini-Unit

If you need to cover the Human Impact NGSS Standard MS-ESS3-3, this week and a half-long Plastic in the Oceans Mini-Unit teaches students about the ubiquitous, terrible reality of plastic in Earth’s oceans. As a culminating project, students create a Public Service Announcement project to share and educate others about this pollution. You can read more about this topic in this blog post!

Graphing Great Whites Project

Have your students use the website Ocearch to track REAL Great White Sharks and use data about their weights, lengths, swim distances, and ages to create beautiful bar, line, pie, and X-Y graphs! My students LOVE doing this project every year because they get really excited to follow their chosen sharks! Check out this blog post to read more about this project!

Mousetrap Car Project

Your students will have a blast designing and building mousetrap cars! This is such a fun way to end the year in physical science because students will be using hands on skills to learn about energy, simple machines, and speed! You can see the materials list and read more about this project on this blog post!

Design Your Own Periodic Table Project

Let your students express themselves with this Design Your Own Periodic Table project! The possible themes for this project are practically limitless because kids come up with the most interesting topics to categorize into element families!

Newton’s Laws of Motion Video Project

Even if you already covered Newton’s Laws this year, this Newton’s Laws of Motion video demonstration project is still a great one to give your students a chance to show their understanding with an open-ended, creative task. They will make a video to demonstrate each of Newton’s three laws of motion in their every day lives. I’ve included some example videos that you can show your students for inspiration!

Science Passion Project

A Science Passion Project is a project that your students will drive! Let them investigate and come up with a topic that interests them, but also has to do with science! It’s a great way to keep students engaged during testing weeks or at the very end of the school year. I post this document on Google Classroom to provide my students with lots of ideas! I’ve had students choose to learn all about tropical cyclones, the mysteries of space,
and tsunami. I’ve had students create video demonstrations of elephant toothpaste and oobleck! Students’ Passion Projects can take many forms including creating a presentation, a podcast episode, a video documentary, or a book! Let them follow their curiosities and have fun!

 

It’s important to end the school year on a positive and fun note and leave students feeling the warm and fuzzies for the wonder of science! Celebrating all the hard work and learning that has happened throughout the year is a great way to do that. I hope that you find these science project ideas helpful as you plan the end of your school year!