i am doing an advanced 8th grade science fair project on energy drinks? help with please?

Question

okay, me and my friend are doing a science fair project on energy drinks and how they effect a persons heart rate due to caffeine.
Our science teacher told us to use 5 boys and 5 girls of the same age for our test subjects. we were wondering if we should use people with the same height and weight range too.
any suggestions/help?

Answer 1

I would suggest that the group should be as _diverse_ as possible. I'm not sure why your teacher wants to limit the age.

Ideally, you would want more participants and you should give some of the participants the energy drink and some of the participants a very similar looking drink that does not contain caffeine (but does contain other potentially important ingredients, such as sugar).

Since there are two of you administering the experiment, one of you should pour the drinks and record which drinks are the energy drinks and which are the placebos. Then the other person should give the drinks to the test subjects and record the heart rates. Only after you have recorded the results should you find out which person drank which drink.

You should record the heart rates at regular intervals - perhaps every 10 minutes) for at least an hour. Longer would be even better.

If you can't find drinks that look sufficiently like the energy drinks that you are using, then put the drinks into opaque containers so that the person passing out the drinks cannot tell which is which. Identify the drinks only by number (the number is assigned by the person who pours the drinks).

Answer 2

I think this is an interesting idea, but you should have 3 separate test groups. Group 1, corn for 3 weeks Group 2, oats for 3 weeks Group 3, super food for 3 weeks Group 4, control. (Regular chicken feed) You'll need to keep track of numbers, such as total eggs per week, and eggs per day, and if there are any discrepancies, (i.e. 4 eggs one day, none the next, etc.) It sounds like a good idea, but you really need more chickens. You can't conduct the experiments for only one week each, and you have to have time between the changes in diet. If oats help them produce more eggs, and corn doesn't, it could still appear that the corn helps them produce eggs. Also, there are other factors, such as weather, comfort, etc. These trials chould be taking place at the same time, and separately. Also, you need to track how well these chickens lay eggs before the trials, since not all chickens lay as many eggs. If you could get some more for the tests, it'd be great, and you would get a better grade since there's less chance for one chicken throwing all the numbers off.

Answer 3

You're on the right track - use people with different body mass indexes (BMIs) this is a number that combines height and weight for comparison. See wikipedia or google it. In theory, people with a larger BMI will metabolize the caffeine at a different rate, due to higher body fat.

Good luck.