The Scientific Method: The investigative process of our world.
Ask a question
The scientific method starts when you ask a question about the world.
What is the problem that needs to be investigated?
Do background research
Find out if others have asked the same or similar questions. What did they learn?
Construct a hypothesis
Roughly speaking a hypothesis is an educated guess about the problem.
Your hypothesis should be constructed in a way that is easy to test and will answer your original question: "If this, then that will happen"
Conduct an experiment
Test your hypothesis by conducting an experiment. Experiments will show if your hypothesis is true or false.
It is important that the experiment is a fair test, that only examines one variable at a time.
Experiments should be run several times to make sure the results are accurate. Typically, the more times you run an experiment the more confident you can be in the results.
Analyze your results
Analyze the results of your experiment.
Did your hypothesis prove true? Great! Move on to the next step.
Did you hypothesis prove false? Great! You know more about the problem now than you did before. Think about your results and form a new hypothesis. Go back to step 4.
Report your findings
Tell the world what you have learned!
Scientists usually publish their results in peer-reviewed journals. There other scientists can read about the problem and ask their own questions and build upon that scientists ideas.