Let's start with the Scientific Method

Here, thanks to a greate site called Science Buddies
is a concise breakdown of the Scientific Method. Used by scientists world wide, and misunderstood by countless thousands, nay millions, who believe the method is used simply to posit some purely theoretical nonsense about evolution under the guise of leading good Cristians away from g-d, or some other heathen crap.

Here it is, in all it's verifiable glory, the Scientific Method:

The scientific method is a process for experimentation that is used to answer questions and explore observations.

Scientists use an experiment to search for cause and effect relationships in nature. In other words, they design an experiment so that changes to one item cause something else to vary in a predictable way. These changing quantities are called variables. Variables are a key element of the scientific method.

1. Stating the Question:
What is it that you are trying to find out from your experiment? What is it that you are trying to achieve?

2. Research Your Topic:
Investigate what others have already learned about your question. Gather information that will help you perform your experiment.

3. State Your Hypothesis:
After having thoroughly researched a topic, you should have some prediction about what you think will happen in your experiment. This educated guess concerning the outcome is called your hypothesis. You must state your hypothesis in a way that you can readily measure.

4. Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment:
Now that you have come up with a hypothesis, you need to develop a procedure for testing whether it is true or false. This involves changing one variable and measuring the impact that this change has on other variables. When you are conducting your experiment, you need to make sure that you are only measuring the impact of a single change.

Scientists run experiments more than once to verify that results are consistent. Each time that you perform your experiment is called a run or a trial.

5. Analyze Your Results:
At this stage, you want to be organizing and analyzing the data that you have collected during the course of your experiment in order to summarize what your experiment has shown you.

6. Draw Your Conclusion:
This is your opportunity to explain the meaning of your results. Did your experiment support your hypothesis? Does additional research need to be conducted? How did your experiment address your initial question and purpose?

7. Report Your Results and Conclusion:
Since you are performing an experiment for the science fair, you will write a report and prepare a display board so that others can share in your discoveries.

Throughout the process of doing your project, you should keep a journal containing all of your important ideas and information. This journal is called a laboratory notebook.