Does growing a sugar crystal farm have anything to do with science?

Question

i was thinking about growing a sugar crystal farm for the science fair but i donteven know if it has anything to do with science

i'm in 8th grade and i want to grow a sugar crystal farm for the science fair but i dont know if it has anything to do with science

Answer 1

As the two others have hinted at, crystallography is a major aspect of chemistry, biology, materials science, and geology. But to be a scientist you need to study a system, and preferably then understand it well enough to make predictions.

Growing a lot of sugar crystals has little to do with science. As a a simple possibility you could do what the other people recommended: just have some pictures and explanations. It's not really doing science, but it shows you understand the system.

If you want to "do" science, then you have to experiment with the system. Grow the crystals under different temperatures: room temp, in the fridge, outside (probably a different temperature), near an AC/heat vent. Trying growing it with different surfaces: glass cup, plastic cup, metal cup. Throw some sand into one cup, small pebbles into another, some wood shavings (or a broken popsicle stick) into another. Try growing sugar and salt crystals under these conditions, they're very different chemically (covalent vs. ionic), how does that affect their growth? Then try to look for patterns and make predictions.

You don't have to do all of those things, pick a couple. Studying a system by systematically controlling all variables and varying only one and therefore understanding how that one variable controls the system is what science is all about.

Answer 2

Sure. It's about crystallization. You should, of course, back up your project with an understanding of what this is and how it works.

Simply growing the farm, of course, is not high-school level. Having a solid explanation (maybe with some close-ups and some sketches of sucrose molecules in a crystalline structure) is.

Answer 3

Sure it does, because the structures of crystals is directly related to the structure of the stuff that makes it.

What you might want to do is to do some research about different crystal shapes and try to grow different kinds of crystals using a bunch of different compounds.