Forget the volcano.

As students across the state start formulating ideas for their science fair projects, they should look for original ideas, not those that have been done again and again.

Science fair judges say they're looking for unique experiments, not ones that are just replicating the work of the past.

"These aren't necessarily the ones that come out of books for suggested science fair projects," said Brent Sipes, one of the judges for the Hawai'i State Science and Engineering Fair. "These are something that someone comes up with on their own."

Unique experiments don't have to be complicated. Students should "ask a very simple question about something that interests them," Sipes said.

Thousands of students across the state will be thinking up these simple hypotheses as soon as they begin preparation for their school science fair, the first rung in the circuit that culminates in the state science fair in April, when a few hundred of the best student scientists will compete for recognition and the chance to advance to national and international level competitions.

While many of the winning projects are complicated and require the use of scientific instruments, that degree of sophistication is not required for a successful project.

Sipes uses the example of a student who tested the effectiveness of breath mints by eating one and asking others to sniff her breath. "That's pretty neat," he said.

The projects also should be ones that can be replicated and that take variables into account. In the breath-mint case, this called for several people to eat the mint and several people to do the sniffing. "Recognizing that things can vary makes for a good science fair project," Sipes said.

Another thing that can make the difference is a good display. "It's pretty important because it really conveys the sense of what you've done. If the display is put together well, it tends to demonstrate the experiment was well thought out and put together," he said.

A haphazard display, on the other hand, can suggest sloppy work.

Jane Schoonmaker, another judge, said students need to come up with a question they can test with the facilities they have available.

"The key is to get students thinking about asking questions about nature around them or science that they've been exposed to in their classes," she said. "Then they develop a hypothesis and a plan to test it."

Ideas can come from a variety of sources, such as books, classroom texts, news media and science magazines. "They can find things that spark their imagination, look at things that have been done previously and see how they can adapt that to a slightly different experiment," she said.

For example, local news has talked about the Ala Wai Canal, which could launch projects on water pollution. Or reading up on agriculture could lead to an experiment about plant growth and what conditions are most conducive to high yield and crop rates, she said.

Coming up with a hypothesis they can collect measurable data for can be one of the biggest challenges for children, who can have unbounded curiosity but difficulty narrowing it down into a feasible experiment, she said.

Schoonmaker's daughter had to do a science project a few years ago when she was in junior high school. She came up with a number of ideas, only to have her mother, a geochemist, ask how she planned to test them.

She settled on a project of the effects of water on fish growth, but even that idea had to be refined.

"She wanted to get hydrophones and go out on her dad's boat and blast music," Schoonmaker said. "I had to ask her, 'What are you going to measure? How are you going to tell if there's an effect or not?' "

Her daughter ended up getting guppies from a friend's fish pond and piping Hawaiian slack key music into some tanks and nothing into others, then she periodically weighed the fish to see how they were growing.

"That got her involved in reading about the physiology of sound and how they receive sound," Schoonmaker said. "She ended up doing a pretty good little project."

Need help with an idea?

Reach Treena Shapiro at tshapiro@honoluluadvertiser.com.