- Registration Due: January 31st, 2025
- Corrections/Updates Due: Febrary 25th, 2025
- Fair: March 10th, 2025
Plan a research project that excites you! To ensure student, human, and animal safety, make sure your project adheres to the rules or it will be disqualified. Make sure you understand the rules and guidelines before you begin developing your plan.
Find an area of STEM that interests you! Maybe it’s Computer Science, Animal Science, or Microbiology. Make sure you have access to your area of STEM, as it would be difficult to study moon rocks in junior high or high school! Science Buddies offers a science fair project wizard that may help you in this process!
The goal of the ND SERSEF is to inspire students to discover something new through studying or testing a hypothesis or experimental design. For example, maybe you want to study Plant Sciences. Within the discipline of Plant Sciences, there are a lot of things that you could find out. Maybe you think that flowers will grow taller if they are grown in larger pots. Your hypothesis could then be “Flowers grown in 2 foot diameter pots will grow taller than flowers grown in 6 inch diameter pots.” You would then plan how to test your hypothesis, which is Step 3. Make sure that your hypothesis is testable, as you probably can’t find out what moon rock is made of in high school.
The next step is to create a research plan to test your hypothesis. A research plan details how you plan to test your hypothesis, and needs to be approved by your local or SERSEF Scientific Review Committee before you begin your research. (Click HERE for the Research Plan Form.) In the previous example of the hypothesis “Flowers grown in 2 ft. diameter pots will grow taller than flowers grown in 6 in. diameter pots,” you could test your hypothesis by growing 20 flowers in 2 ft. diameter pots and 20 flowers in 6 in. diameter pots and then determine which flowers grew taller after 6 months.
Before you begin your research project, you must get approval by submitting all the required forms and register by paying your participation fee.
If the Scientific Review Committee (SRC) has any concerns with your project, you will need to correct and update your forms as required. Projects with SRC concerns that do not update/correct their submission will be interviewed by the SRC on the day of the fair and may not be allowed to participate.
After forming your hypothesis and having your research plan approved, you can now test your hypothesis. During this stage of your research, you will complete the testing you described in your research plan!
This is a very important step in your research, as it would be hard to determine which flowers grew taller – the ones grown in the bigger pot or smaller pot – by just looking at your data points in a notebook. Instead of looking at this list of 40 datapoints, you can calculate the average height of the flowers grown in the bigger pots and the average height of the flowers grown in the smaller pots and compare the two averages.
There are a lot of other ways to analyze data and you can talk to your science teachers to learn more!
A very important part of the STEM research process is communicating your findings to others. Students of the ND SERSEF get to be a part of this process by showing their research to judges, volunteers, and the public.
Displays help students show their research with graphs, tables, diagrams, pictures, written explanations, or other visual elements. Common display options include:
There are many other amazing ways to display your research, but there are also limitations on displays for the safety and equity of the SERSEF presenters. Click below to learn more about the Display and Safety Regulations that all Junior Division and Senior Division participants must adhere to.
Abstracts (or project explanations) allow students to summarize the importance, methods, and results of their research to judges. These must be completed and brought to the fair.
The SERSEF judges also ask the competitors questions to gain a better understanding of their research, the inspiration for their research, and their knowledge of their research topic. Some tips:
The fair is a celebration of learning! Be prepared and have fun.
Set up your display in the 2nd Floor Meeting Rooms of the Fargodome prepared to discuss your research and answer questions! Don’t forget to bring the following completed forms:
SERSEF registration fees and student registration must be submitted to SERSEF by this time.
All project paperwork will be reviewed by this date and projects with SRC concerns will be notified on or before this date.
Submission deadline of
corrections/updates to project submission as notified on February 11th.
2025 North Dakota Southeast Regional Science & Engineering Fair (FARGODOME, Fargo, ND)
