The wearing of face masks to help fight the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a topic of much discussion. No one likes wearing these stupid masks. But hopefully everyone wants to help prevent spreading the covid virus. So do masks actually help with this?

A recent paper was published that outlines a simple method for testing mask efficacy, titled "Low-cost measurement of face mask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech". In this guide we will show how you could recreate the test setup from that paper and run the experiment for yourself, along with results from our own recreation.

We think this would make for a great experiment to run in an educational setting. It has all the elements of the scientific method and can be carried out with reasonably cheap and accessible hardware and software.