Do you by chance already keep an aquarium? Or does anyone else in the family or nearby neighbors?
You might be able to manage something as simple as watering some house plants with the water change water from the aquarium and other house plants simply with plain water. That would be a pretty simple thing to do over a period of a few months.
There is a member in Wilmington, North Carolina that is currently working on setting up his system
http://backyardaquaponics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=5259
Now back to your project and aquaponics. Perhaps simply documenting getting a bio-filter up and cycled might be worth a science fair project. It might not be as showy as a plant growth comparison but with a test kit, a couple/few small aquariums/small pumps and buckets of gravely and assorted plumbing bits. You could perhaps do some comparisons of say different methods of cycling a system up. Or perhaps compare cycling one system with some filter gunk from a friend's cycled aquarium filter and another mini system just cycling naturally.
Documenting and comparing some small systems getting cycled up could also prepare you if you decide you want to do a project next year where you use those system to do the side by side comparison of growing some fast veggies in soil and in the AP systems.
Ya might read about fishless cycling but I think you will want to find a source of urea fertilizer or some pure (no detergent, fragrance or other added) ammonia for a science fair project rather than using any of the "pee ponic" methods of fishless cycling. You can also use cheap goldfish for cycling up systems but cycling with fish always has the stress and danger of killing fish and can take longer if water changes are needed to keep the fish safe/alive
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