Hilton Head Island Middle School Science Fair

Evidence of Experiment

Student Name: _______________________________________________________________________

Please follow this rubric to complete the third submittal of your science fair project. This submittal is worth 15
SUMMATIVE POINTS and will be graded in the 2nd Marking Period. This MUST be turned in on time or points
will be deducted! Follow the rubric carefully for achieve maximum points! Include:

Problem Statement – the problem is the question that you are trying to answer.

How are beaches affected by erosion?

Hypothesis – a hypothesis is your educated guess at the answer to the problem.

If storm activity is present in an area, than that area will have signs of erosion.

Real World Application of Study – an explanation of why this project is important and useful to humans
and/or society.
The beach plays a large role in the coastal ecosystem. Healthy ecosystems clean our water, purify our air, maintain
our soil, regulate the climate, recycle nutrients and provide us with food.

Presentation of Data – create and present the data you collected during and at the end of your experiment.
You will be graded based on the following point system where each requirement is one point:

MEASUREMNTS OF SAND OVER TIME

 Experimental Notes and Pictures– describe how your experiment went, issues that you experienced, any
changes you had to make, unforeseen problems, surprises, etc. You will present three notes that would
serve as future talking points.
EXPERIMENTAL NOTES:
Note 1: The first problem that we encountered was finding a location that we could accurately measure for multiple
weeks with only the sand moving around it and not the object itself.

Note 2: Anothercomplication was trying to get measurements as water and wind is constantly moving
sand. This made it difficult to gather accurate measurements and forced us to return at a later time.

Note 3: After obtaining our first measurement, we realized that we needed more data to support our hypothesis.. We
used the data from the time chart to further show the impact of tides with erosion. It was important to take
measurements at different shifts of the tides so that we help prove that regardless of time or location, tides
contribute to erosion.
PICTURE OF EXPERIMENT:

EXAMPLE OF ERROSION OVER TIME BOARDWALK PYLON WHERE WE

MEASURE

Reflection – now that you completed the experiment, reflect on how well your methods matched what you did.
Do you need to go back to edit your methods? Explain.

As we reflected, about our data we realized that thus far our data supports our hypothesis. As we were
researching about the experiment and process we should follow, we learned a lot more information about the
ecosystem then we had known before. Our planned methods did match what we did. Although we didn't
change our methods, it may have been better to use a ruler instead of a tape measurer for our experiment to
allow for a more stable tool to use to measure.