75 8th Grade Science Fair Projects – 2025

December 18, 2025

8th grade science fair project ideas

If you teach science to 8th graders, you might be looking for science fair project ideas to inspire your students. Or maybe you’re looking for fresh classroom experiments to demonstrate biology, chemistry, and physics principles. Continue reading for 75 science fair project ideas for 8th grade with a range of topics and difficulty levels.

8th Grade Science Fair Projects – Things to consider

Each project below comes with a ranking according to difficulty and materials, which you can consider as you decide which projects to share with your 8th grade students.

Difficulty: As you choose a project for your class, it’s important to consider the difficulty of the project. Do your 8th grade students have enough time for this project? Have they reached a high enough level in the scientific area? Each of these projects is rated “basic,” “medium,” or “advanced” based on the complexity of the concept involved and the amount of time it will take.

Materials: The projects below also range in terms of materials and setup, and they are listed as “basic,” “medium,” or “advanced.” This can help you determine what kind of preparation is required in order to complete each project.

Biology Science Fair Project Ideas

1) How to Measure Lung Capacity

Using simply a balloon and a tape measurer, this experiment allows students to measure human health and athleticism. It can be made more or less complicated depending on the measurements taken (circumference only vs. volume of the balloon, for example).

2) How Clean is Your Water?

Do you have a water-testing kit on hand? If not, you can purchase one for under $30. This simple kit opens numerous possibilities for science fair projects, including testing the water quality of local streams, ponds, swimming pools, and drinking-water taps. Water testing is a great way to teach about pollution and the importance of clean water sources.

3) Plant Light Maze

Ever noticed how plants grow towards light? With a simple experiment, your students can watch as a plant grows around obstacles. Your plant maze can be as simple or as complex as you’d like.

4) How to Find and Cast Animal Tracks

Are your students up to a bit of detective work? In this experiment, they can track animals and study their tracks using a homemade plaster mold, and then comparing them for size, shape, and location.

5) Plants, Nitrogen, and Bacteria

Explore how nitrogen aids plant growth with this 8th grade science project, which involves comparing the growth of pea plants with and without nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

6) Do Plants Like Music?

 Do plants appreciate the music you play? This experiment determines whether classical music affects the growth and health of plants (though you can use any genre you’d like, or test multiple different genres).

7) Crime Scene: Fingerprinting

This project is especially great for students interested in forensic science. It can be completed using a purchased fingerprinting kit and simple household supplies.

8) Myers-Briggs and Memory

Are your students interested in exploring questions of psychology, memory, and mental health? This experiment involves asking volunteers to take a Myers-Briggs personality test, followed by a simple memory exam. They only need internet access and willing volunteers, no extra materials needed!

9) Tooth Decay with Egg Shells

Since eggshells share similar properties to teeth, your students can use them to test how different beverages erode tooth enamel. This project teaches biology concepts while also encouraging healthy eating and dental care.

10) Do Plants Like Soda?

For an easy experiment on plant growth, try watering plants with different liquids. You can test different water sources (tap water, rain water, etc.), different salt-levels in water, or even the difference between water and soda.

11) Vitamin C Titration

For a nutrition-focused experiment, see whether cooked fruits and vegetables have less Vitamin C than raw ones. This involves a slightly more complex procedure, so it’s perfect for your advanced 8th grade classes.

12) Algae and Phosphorous Pollution

Have you taught your students about fertilizer runoff and its harmful impacts on local waterways? In this experiment, students can test the effects of pollutants on algae growth using household fertilizers and other materials.

13) Hydroponics vs. Soil 

Perfect for students with a green thumb, this experiment allows students to test whether plants grow faster hydroponically or in soil.

14) Bioluminescent Plankton

For the glowing students out there (as well as the future marine biologists), this project allows 8th graders to understand how glowing waves are caused by microscopic organisms in the ocean.

15) Extracting DNA from Onions

In this experiment, students can use a variety of household supplies to see if DNA is able to survive separately from other cell components.

16) Sleep and Memory

Can sleep deprivation affect memory? Have your students ask volunteers a series of trivia questions after getting 8 or 5 hours of sleep. While this project takes some planning, organization, and willing volunteers, it’s a fun way to promote healthy sleep habits.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: basic
  • Learn more: sleep and memory (plus a few more sleep-related experiment ideas)

17) Testing Taste Thresholds

This hands-on experiment measures personal taste thresholds, compares sensitivity across sweet, salty, and sour flavors, and shows how human perception varies. Results highlight biological differences, sensory limits, and why people experience foods differently from person to person naturally everywhere.

18) Make a Heart Rate Monitor

Bring real-world engineering into your classroom with this engaging heart-rate monitor project. Students build a simple electronic circuit using a pulse sensor to detect changes in blood flow and convert them into heart-rate data. The activity introduces basic electronics, sensors, and data collection while reinforcing life science concepts about the cardiovascular system through hands-on learning.

19) Anticoagulants and Blood Disorders

Students create a blood-clotting model using safe chemicals to mimic how real blood coagulates. They mix a sodium alginate solution with calcium chloride to form gel “clots,” then add varying amounts of an anticoagulant (sodium citrate) to see how it disrupts clot formation. By measuring and comparing results, students explore coagulation and anticoagulants’ effects.

20) Test Your Hearing Threshold

Students test their hearing by playing tones at various frequencies and volumes, identifying the quietest sound they can detect. They record and graph results to explore differences in auditory sensitivity, learning how pitch and individual factors affect human hearing.

21) Understanding Circadian Rhythms

Students measure their body temperature and reaction time at regular intervals to track daily circadian rhythm patterns, then graph results to explore how physiological changes vary over the day.

22) Why Do We Get Dizzy?

Students spin volunteers in a controlled experiment, measuring involuntary eye movements and dizziness. By recording and comparing results, they explore how the inner ear, eyes, and balance systems coordinate, revealing how the body maintains equilibrium during motion.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: basic
  • Learn more: dizziness

23) How Do Puppies Keep Warm?

Students simulate puppy snuggles using warm jars of water to see how huddling keeps critters cozy. By measuring heat loss when “puppies” stick together versus chill alone, they discover why animals are basically expert blanket hogs and how teamwork literally keeps everyone warm.

Chemistry Science Fair Project Ideas

24) Starch Test with Iodine

For a simple chemistry experiment, help your 8th grade students to understand properties of starch and its presence in various foods.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: medium
  • Learn more: starch test

25) Carbon Sugar Snake

Through the simple chemical reaction of sugar and baking soda, you can make a fiery snake rise from the ground. Take note of safety while doing this experiment, since fire and lighter fluid are involved.

26) Juice Spherification

Try this for a fun and aesthetically-pleasing experiment, which allows your students to create edible spheres, or to “spherify” water and other liquids.

27) Hand-Warming Chemistry

Ever wish you could heat up your hands on a cold day? Instead of buying a commercial warmer, try making one of these. This experiment offers a practical solution to an everyday problem.

28) Sports Drink Challenge (for electrolytes)

We’ve all heard sports drinks advertised as having electrolytes. What does this mean, exactly? Is drinking Gatorade really much better than a glass of orange juice? Try this experiment to find out. You’ll need a few special supplies, including a multimeter and an ohm resistor.

29) What’s the Best Detergent

Test which laundry detergent is really cleaning your clothes. After making coffee, ketchup, and makeup stains on white handkerchiefs, students will test several laundry detergent brands for effectiveness. For an extra challenge, they can analyze the ingredients in each detergent to see which is the most active.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: medium
  • Learn more: laundry lab

30) Color-Changing Beads for UV Resistance

Through this experiment, you can use color-changing UV beads to test the protective power of various household objects against the sun.

31) Taco Sauce Penny Cleaner

Can you really clean pennies with taco sauce? Have your students collect their most tarnished pennies and test the theory. Then, see which ingredient (or combination of ingredients) in taco sauce is the most effective by testing them separately.

32) Effects of Acid Rain

In order to understand how acid rain affects buildings and other structures, students can use chalk for a stand-in for stone. For a more complex project, they can explore ways of protecting the structures, thereby mitigating the effects of acid rain.

33) Hot Yeast Experiment

Discover how temperature impacts yeast fermentation. The ingredients are simple: clear glasses, 3 balloons, 3 packets of yeast, sugar, and water.

34) Root Beer Brewing

Root beer, a favorite soda for many, is actually just a combination of water, sugar, and flavorings (plus carbonation, which comes from carbon dioxide gas). For a delicious 8th grade science fair project, test ingredients for the best root beer brew (students can test for fizziness, sweetness, or best flavor by popular vote).

35) Extracting Bismuth from Pepto-Bismol

For a more complex chemistry procedure, grind some Pepto-Bismol pills and extract bismuth, its active ingredient. This experiment takes a while, so make sure you leave time for multiple trials.

36) Homemade Ice Cream

The secret to making ice cream is to lower the freezing point of ice. The secret to this secret? Salt. With this experiment, you can have delicious vanilla ice cream ready in about 20 minutes. Test different ingredients and times for the best results.

37) Rock Candy

Here’s another delicious one, which only requires dipping a string in some sugar water to create a beautiful candy crystal.

38) Waterproof Fabric

In this experiment, you can test different clothing materials (nylon? Wool? Polyester? Silk?) to see which is the most water resistant.

39) Soap and Surface Tension

Surface tension, put simply, causes the molecules in the surface of a liquid to cling together. In this 8th grade science fair project, you can test how soap affects surface tension.

40) What Makes Ice Melt Faster?

You students will investigate how different substances—such as salt, sugar, or sand—affect the rate at which ice melts. By measuring and comparing melt times, they explore how chemical and physical interactions influence phase changes.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: medium
  • Learn more: melting ice

41) How to Build a Water Filtration System

Students test how well different activated‑carbon filter materials clean “contaminated” water by filtering ink‑colored samples with powdered carbon, granular carbon, or no carbon, then comparing clarity to see which material best removes impurities. The project highlights how particle size and surface area influence filtration effectiveness.

42) How Does a Cold Pack Work?

Students explore how instant cold packs work by mixing the chemicals inside and measuring the temperature drop. By testing different amounts and recording changes, they learn how this simple chemical reaction absorbs heat, creating a cooling effect and demonstrating basic principles of energy transfer.

  • Difficulty: advanced
  • Materials: medium
  • Learn More: cold pack

43) Color-changing Iodine Clock

This experiment lets students safely explore reaction rates by timing a color change in the iodine clock reaction, helping them see how changing hydrogen peroxide concentration affects speed and introduces basic chemical kinetics concepts clearly.

  • Difficulty: advanced
  • Materials: medium
  • Learn more: iodine clock

44) Grow Your Own Crystals

This project has students grow borax crystals under different temperature conditions to discover which produces the largest, purest crystals, teaching solubility, saturation, recrystallization, and effects of cooling rate on crystal growth.

Physics and Engineering Science Fair Project Ideas

45) Build-a-lightbulb

Teach your 8th graders about electricity with this simple lightbulb project. By experimenting with simple materials, students can explore how to create the longest-lasting and brightest light source.

46) Built-a-platform

Any aspiring architects in your class? In this physics and engineering challenge, students create a paper cup structure (with three or more platforms for an extra challenge) that can support their weight.

47) Solar-Powered Oven

Food-related projects aren’t reserved for chemistry. Your students can make s’mores by engineering their own ovens, changing up the construction process for different results.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: medium
  • Learn more: solar oven

48) Engineer a Roller Coaster

Challenge your students to create a roller coaster, loops included. They can experiment with the height and size of the loops, as well as marble weight.

49) Crash Cars

This experiment involves building cars out of basic classroom materials (plus miniature wheels and axles, which can be found easily online). Then, students can crash-test their cars with raw eggs inside as “passengers.” What structures best protect the egg?

50) Find Your Center

Help unexpected objects balance in unexpected places with this center of gravity experiment. Using pipe cleaners and clothes pins, play with raising and lowering an object’s center of gravity. Though this project is simple, but it certainly isn’t easy.

51) Spinning Glasses of Water

While you might think that swinging a bucket of water over your head would leave you soaked, if you swing it around fast enough, you might actually stay dry. Your students can understand the physics behind this phenomenon by building homemade “centrifugal force boards.” Change variables such as speed and cup shape for added complexity.

52) Power Homemade Batteries

This experiment offers an excellent intro to electricity using materials that your students likely already have at home.

53) Graphite Circuit

For another electricity-focused experiment, challenge your students to create an electrical circuit using pencil graphite. Since it involves drawing, students can put their art skills to use for a beautiful result.

54) Homemade Projector

This experiment is a great way for students to understand the science behind light. All they need is a smartphone with videos, a cardboard box, a magnifying glass, and a few basic tools. Different box and magnifying glass measurements can be used as variables.

55) Parachute Egg-drop

Help an egg reach a safe landing by creating a homemade parachute. Test multiple kinds of parachutes to learn about force and gravity, and see which one protects the egg most effectively.

56) Coin Tower

In this demonstration, students build towers of coins and use physics concepts to remove the bottom coin with a butter knife. For experimental variations, use different amounts and sizes of coins.

57) Wind-powered Car

By creating a sort of sailboat-car-hybrid, students can learn the engineering behind basic vehicles, adjusting its components to test for speed and distance.

58) Balancing Water Glass

For another architecturally-relevant exercise, create a system of knives and bottles that can balance a full glass of water in the middle. Play with different design elements to conduct a challenging engineering experiment.

59) Build an Electric Motor

In this activity, students build a simple electric motor with basic materials to see electricity in action. It’s a hands-on way to explore how electric currents, magnetic fields, and forces interact to convert electrical energy into mechanical motion.

60) Make Your Own Crystal Radio

Students build a crystal radio receiver from basic parts like wire, a diode, a coil, and an antenna to pick up real AM broadcasts while learning about radio waves, tuning, resonance, and simple circuits.

  • Difficulty: advanced
  • Material: advanced
  • Learn more: crystal radio

61) Build a Robot Hand

In this hands-on STEM activity, students build a simple robotic hand from everyday materials like straws, string, and cardboard to explore basic mechanics, how joints and tendons work, and how robots can mimic human hand movement.

  • Difficulty: basic
  • Material: basic
  • Learn more: robot hand

62) Make a Hydraulic Lift

Your students will create mini hydraulic lifts with syringes and tubing to see how liquids can turn them into tiny superheroes, lifting heavy loads while experimenting with piston sizes and discovering the secret power of fluid pressure.

  • Difficulty: advanced
  • Materials: 
  • Learn more: hydraulics

63) How to Make a Spring Scale

Ever wondered how a spring can “feel” weight? Students build their own spring scale to explore Hooke’s Law, stretching springs to see how force and extension relate while measuring the weight of all sorts of fun objects.

  • Difficulty: advanced
  • Material: medium
  • Learn more: Hooke’s law

64) Geothermal Power

Picture Earth as a giant hot battery: this project has students build a model geothermal plant and use steam to spin a pinwheel so they can explore how Earth’s internal heat can be tapped for renewable energy.

More Ideas for Classroom Learning – 8th Grade Science Fair Projects

65) Newton’s Cradle

Your 8th grade students might have seen a Newton’s cradle, but have they created one? Teach them about energy transfer and momentum using only simple materials such as marbles, string, and popsicle sticks.

66) Floating Compass

With only a cork, a needle, and a glass of water, teach your students about magnetic forces and Earth’s poles.

67) Relight a Candle

Once a candle goes out, it may seem impossible to relight it without a new match. Think again! This experiment teaches students about the seemingly magical workings of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen. Take it a step further by changing the variables of wax temperature, wick size, and candle type.

68) Ring of Pringles

This edible STEM challenge is perfect for a fun break mid-semester or for the last day of school. Though it seems easy, it will likely take students multiple tries to figure out.

69) Light Maze

Create a maze of objects and work to get a beam of light through. This is a great way to engage your students using objects you already have sitting around.

  • Difficulty: medium
  • Materials: basic
  • Learn more: light maze

70) Build a Cup Holder

For a challenging engineering exercise, give your students 5-minutes to create a device that can balance and carry two cups of water. Have them test their cup holders as a fun outdoor activity.

71) How to Extract DNA

DNA, found in the nucleus of cells, acts as a sort of blueprint for the development and functioning of organisms. While this may seem somewhat inaccessible to 8th grade students, it’s actually possible to extract using classroom lab materials, soap, and mouthwash solution.

72) Separate Water into Hydrogen and Oxygen

For the 8th grade chemistry teachers out there, you can demonstrate how water is actually formed out of two gases using electrolysis, a process that reduces H20 back to H and O.

73) Unpoppable Balloon

It may surprise your 8th grade students that you can hold a balloon up to a flame without popping it. Thanks to water, a great absorber of heat, the rubber barely even weakens when it touches a flame.

74) Grow Garbage Plants

For an ongoing class experiment that you can track over a series of weeks, grow plants using different kinds of compost and garbage to see which kind of matter facilitates the quickest growth. This project is a great way to promote collaboration and sustainability in your classroom.

  • Difficulty: basic
  • Materials: basic
  • Learn more: multimeter

75) Make Seaweed Fabric

Imagine turning seaweed into eco-friendly fabric! This activity has students make different alginate-based biofabrics from seaweed, test their strength, flexibility, and sew-ability, and compare recipes to see which could best replace traditional textiles.

8th Grade Science Fair Projects – Additional Resources 

Whether you’re teaching your 8th grade students about plant biology, discussing chemical properties, or helping them understand what it takes to engineer a car, these science fair projects and classroom learning activities are great ways to challenge your students. For further classroom resources relevant for middle school learning, we recommend the following articles:

 

 

 

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Sarah Mininsohn

With a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Sarah is a writer, educator, and artist. She served as a graduate instructor at the University of Illinois, a tutor at St Peter’s School in Philadelphia, and an academic writing tutor and thesis mentor at Wesleyan’s Writing Workshop.

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