[Transcript: Safety & Ethics – Science Fair Club Video #2]

Jack:
Hello, my name is Jack, and I am a STEM instructor at Creative Encounters with Science, conducted through the University of Guelph.

In our last video, we reviewed the scientific method, which we discussed in our last Science Fair Club meeting. If you missed the last video, click the link in the description or visit our website to learn more about our free Science Fair Club, conducted through Zoom video chat.

Today, we are going to be talking about safety and ethics—and the best way to practice them during a science fair project.

While conducting and designing your experiment, always consider how you can modify your experiment to minimize the risk of injuring yourself or others. This will ensure that your experiment is both safe and ethical, which enables us as researchers to continue to discover new things about the world around us—without hurting anyone or damaging anything.

First, let's go over safety.

When you're creating your experimental design, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions.

First of all: Is there a possibility that you could get hurt?
If you have to put yourself in danger in order to obtain data, then you need to rework your experiment to be a low-risk project. A low-risk project is one where the potential dangers aren’t any more serious than those you encounter in your everyday life.

Another good question is: How can you protect yourself?
Your project may include a minor risk that isn’t incredibly dangerous but could still result in injury—like using scissors, for example. Keep in mind the potential risks of using your materials, and make sure to have adult supervision when necessary.

You may or may not have heard of the term ethics before. Your ethics are like a code that you live by—or what you think is right or wrong to do.

In order for your experiment to be ethical, you have to keep in mind the same ideas we already discussed about safety.

If you're doing a project involving humans other than yourself, you should always consider how your experiment would make someone feel. You need to make sure that your participants are not just physically safe from harm, but also feel comfortable with being a part of your project.

You should never, ever make someone do something they don’t want to do.

You also have to make sure that you inform your participants about your project and answer all of their questions. It’s very important to let them know that their results will remain anonymous, meaning that you will not use their names in your presentation.

And finally, you should leave out any information about someone that does not directly relate to your project.

It is very important to take ethics and safety into account when you’re designing your science fair project. This is because they allow us to explore science while staying safe.

If you have any questions about ethics and safety, or any other component of your project, please email us at ces.scifair@uoguelph.ca, and I or another member of our team will be happy to help you.

We will be releasing more videos in the next few days, so keep an eye out for those. And our club meetings will take place every other Monday in the new year, starting on January 4th.

Visit our website to sign up for our virtual Science Fair Club on Zoom video chat, and follow our Instagram at CES Clubs to get frequent updates on all of our club initiatives.

Creative Encounters with Science is a proud member of the Actua network, and we would like to thank our parent company, as well as all of their sponsors, for making Science Fair Club possible.

I hope you enjoyed this video, and thank you for watching!