Stand out with your junior high school independent research! A collection of fun experiment and craft ideas
To all middle schoolers who want to wow teachers and friends with a “That’s awesome!” in your independent research project! There are tons of experiments in science and crafts that lead to surprising discoveries—even with simple materials.
Make a train run with copper wire and a battery, pop a balloon with an orange peel…
The real charm is getting to witness strange phenomena you’d never notice in everyday life with your own eyes.
Here, we’ll introduce fun experiments and crafts that can spark ideas for your project.
Whether you love science or not, you’re sure to find discoveries that make you go, “Aha!”
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Stand out with your junior high school independent projects! A collection of fun experiment and craft ideas (161–170)
Making a cajón
How about making a cajón, a percussion instrument that produces different sounds depending on where you hit it? You can make one with wooden boards and a part called a snare.
As long as you have the materials, it can be finished in less than half a day.
The tone will change depending on the size of the hole you make in the side and the position of the snare.
You can buy a snare in the percussion section of a music store, but you can also substitute bells.
If you use bells, you can even get them at a 100-yen shop.
Genealogy research
How about researching your family tree or even making one yourself? Talk to your father and mother, of course, as well as your grandparents and other relatives.
There’s also the option of checking your family registry at the city hall.
Stand out with your junior high school independent research! A collection of fun experiment and craft ideas (171–180)
Handmade Microscope
This is a handmade microscope using a plastic bottle and a bead.
The mechanism is simple, but you can see finer details than you might expect.
The bead acts like a large convex lens.
Try challenging yourself to see vegetable cells, such as the skin of an onion.
Lorentz force motor
This is a motor experiment that uses the Lorentz force, a force generated by the interaction of magnetism and electric current.
It may look like just placing a cup with aluminum foil attached over a battery, but it starts spinning on its own.
It might be interesting to use this force to run a miniature car.
Kofun Survey
If you live in an area with a nearby kofun (ancient burial mound), why not visit and investigate it yourself? By looking into whose tomb it is and why it has that shape, you can experience the romance of history.
You’ll also get a sense of scale that you can’t grasp just from a textbook.
Festivals Across Japan
There are many different festivals in Japan.
They often feature portable shrines (omikoshi) and dances—so much fun, right? Why are these festivals held at that particular time of year and in that specific form? What first led people to start holding them? Let’s look into these questions.
It could also be interesting to group similar festivals together and examine their differences.
Fossil hunting in the city
Fossils can actually be found near our homes.
How about going to look for them as a summer vacation project? Easy places to search include large rocks along riverbanks and nearby hills where layers of earth are exposed.
Dinosaur bone fossils might be hard to find, but you might come across leaves or shells.
