This strange project is actually based on a comedic essay called "Fart Proudly" by American writer and inventor Benjamin Franklin. The object of this experiment is to find the best material for absorbing the sound of farts. Your student can perform research on homemade sound muting technology and can experiment on how these different materials could be sewed into a pair of pants or undergarments. Students will enjoy getting to say the word "fart" whenever they talk about the project and they will learn about the physics of sound and Benjamin Franklin in the process.
Detectives are always trying to learn new indicators that the people they have in custody are lying. Create a project that involves you coming up with several different ways to tell if your peers are lying. Some examples are blinking, breathing heavily, licking their lips or anything else you can think of. For the project you will need a polygraph lie detector. Find other students who are interested in participating as test subjects. Give them a stack of number cards and have one group of subjects lie about the number they see and have another group tell the truth. Determine if one group had a higher incidence of the indicators you have chosen.
Over the years there have been many different professional baseball players who have been nabbed for cheating. One way that they have been caught is by finding that they used a corked bat, which is supposed to make the baseball travel farther. A corked bat is a wooden baseball bat that has had some of the material removed from the inside. This project will be used to determine if corked bats really do work better than uncorked bats. In this project you can either create a device that will swing the bat at the same angle and with the same force each time or you can swing the bat yourself. Observe to see if the balls hit with the corked bat travelled further or not. If you wish to construct a swinging device, visit the Science Buddies (see references) site for more information.
One of the Internet's most watched videos involved a scientific experiment with Mentos added to Coke to create an explosion. One of the reasons this explosion is so violent is because of the many nucleation sites on a Mentos candy. A nucleation site is a microscopic bump that kick-starts this particular reaction. Test to see if adding larger nucleation sites changes the height of the explosion. By videotaping your explosion with measuring markers in the background, you can watch your tape to see which experimental explosion went the highest.