Science Methods Blog

Week 5 - Playground Surfaces News/Introduction This week in physics lab, we continued to look into our ways to make a playground safe and exciting.  We also looked at another important skill in our look into science, the ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESS.   We can break down each of the different components of this process: Identify the PROBLEM Identifying the challenge, constraints, and finding ways to solve this problem. EXPLORE Completing research on what others have done and experiment with materials for the problem. CREATE Designing and sketching out a plan for your idea. This step also requires justifying your ideas. TRY IT OUT Test the idea and make notes on what worked and what didn't. Make it BETTER Think about how could this design could be improved and make modifications. For this design challenge, we are looking at playground surfaces. How can we design a playground surface that reduces injuries from falls? For our challenge, we need to prevent an egg from breaking when d...

News/Introduction Swings - PixelBay Images This week in Science, we continued our exploration of making a playground fun and exciting. In lab specifically, we thought about the idea of swings and the period .  We defined the period as the amount of time taken for the swing to make a full cycle from its starting position.   For our lab experience today, we played around with washers, weights, and strings to determine what factors would affect the period of our makeshift swings.  Created our swings in class When sharing our results, we tried a method known as the Tuning Protocol. This process consists of 5 steps. Presentation to results to other groups/peers Listening groups and peers have time to ask questions for clarification. Listeners take notes and process the data. Listeners discuss "warm and cool" feedback to each other. Presenters respond to comments and questions From this lab experience, we were able to determine what impacts the period of the a basic pendul...

Week 2 & 3 - Slides News/Introduction To recap from last week, we discussed making playgrounds safe and fun. We also explored methods of making races exciting (both racers finishing at the same time). From this discovery, we talked about speed and how we can represent this mathematically or through a visual model like a graph. For our labs and discussion for these two weeks, we looked at slides! While coming up with questions about slides, we needed to tie these questions into our big question of making a question safe and fun. Some questions that we developed for slides were: What makes a slide fun? What makes a slide safe? Looking at both of these questions, we needed to think about things that we can test when we look at slides (our variables). We developed the following list: Looking at our list of variables, we need to answer a specific question, which is making the slide safe and fun. Using this parameter, we can narrow down our variable list to the ones circled: We split the...