Agriscience Fair

Tips and resources to help you get started!

Pick a topic: choose something that is somewhat interesting to you, if you pick something that you are not interested in you are more likely to lose interest halfway through.

Topic should be a question or something testable: A topic is not “brand xyz feed allows performance horses to run faster than horses on brand wxy feed.” A topic would be “ does a horse's feed impact speed?”

Topic must fit in a division: There are divisions for your experiment such as plant science, animal science, natural resources, etc. Your experiment should fit into one of these categories. Try to avoid topics that do not clearly fit a category.

Go it alone or as a group: you can compete as a group, groups are usually only two students working together on an experiment. You may also compete on your own.

Breakdown: each division is divided into categories. For example, plant science has a category for 8th grade students competing alone, 8th grade teams, 9th-10th grade individuals, 9th-10th grade teams, and so on. Eighth grade students only compete against each other while 9th and 10th graders compete in the same category and 11th and 12th graders compete in another category. Try to avoid teams where a 9th grader is pairing up with a 12th grader, they may not even allow you to compete and if they do you would have to “play up” and compete in the older division which gives you a disadvantage.

Get pictures: from beginning to end of your experiment have someone take pictures of you in action. You will need a few pictures for your board so be sure to have plenty of quality pictures to pick from when it comes time. I would recommend asking Mrs. Hamlin to start a Drive folder for you, she can share it with you so that you can upload photos as you go. Do not count on your phone storage, students have gambled on this before and broke their phone halfway through the experiment and lost everything. Take your photos and then back them up ASAP to avoid this!

Document everything: get a notebook and journal every step of your experiment. Do not tell yourself you will remember and not write it down, I can assure you that you will not remember! Write down every detail possible throughout the process so that when it comes time to write your report you have notes to look back on for information.

Design your board: you have freedom to design your board the way you want for the most part. We have pictures of state winning boards and they all tend to set up their board 1 of 2 ways so I would suggest following one of those formats. We can design your board in Microsoft Publisher or even Google Slides. Once complete you download it as a PDF file and take it to be printed.

Printing your board: ycan get them printed at office supply stores but they typically do not have the quality of other boards. There is a lady in Oologah with a print shop (I believe it is Next Level Graphix) who does an outstanding job and prints boards for several chapters on this side of the state. There are other sign shops that can do what she does, I just know she understands what we need and always produces quality boards. You are free to have your board printed wherever you would like. I recommend having your board ready to print a minimum of 3-4 weeks before you need it as these print shops do get backed up at times and may need a week or two lead time to get your board done.

More information can be found at the links below

http://www.okffa.org/agriscience-fair

https://www.ffa.org/participate/awards/agriscience-fair/