Science Methods 1

  1. The big questions addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did.     Big question: How does a battery power a light bulb? In the lab today, we began by presenting our anchoring activity lesson to our peers and listening to each other's examples. In table groups, we provided and received feedback to help give us suggestions on what is "warm" and "cool" about our lesson and the different things we should think about incorporating within our anchoring activity. This process helped me clarify any misunderstandings and gave me great ideas for different things that will help my lesson plan and benefit student learning outcomes. After finishing our presentations, the focus of the lab was shifted to build off our learning from the previous week's lab, which dealt with lighting bulbs on a circuit board while trying to create different structures, changing how bright or dim the light bulbs are. We talked with our table partners about last week's lab...

  Week 12 Blogpost Driving Question: How can we power clocks and other devices? The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. In the lab this week, we began our discussion by observing a video titled "What's happening inside the wind-up clock?" which featured a close-up view of a clear wind-up clock, showing us how it works and what happens after the alarm goes off. I then developed my own model, trying to explain "Why does the wind-up clock turn on and stay on?" I found that the winder tightens the springs, which store the energy in the spring. Then, that energy slowly releases from the spring, transferring to the gears, which then regulate the ticks of the clock, helping the hands move as the energy is being transferred to them. I realized that all components in the wind-up clock work together to store and transfer energy throughout the clock, keeping it running until the alarm goes off. The energy is stored within the spring and is...

The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did   The big question addressed in the lab today is, " How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?" We began the lab by discussing last week's homework assignment as a table group. Then our focus switched to energy and its lens on motion. We investigated the energy in a pendulum by playing around with the pendulum simulation. I found out the reason for the pendulum slowing down is that the gravitational potential energy is transferred to kinetic energy when it is released to swing, then once it gets back to the other side, it goes back to gravitational potential energy. This causes the pendulum to not be able to get as high as the point it was released from. The transfer of energy causes friction between the pendulum ball and the air, causing thermal energy to be produced, which the constant friction makes the pendulum ball not able to reach the previous height it was dropped from. This ...

  1.  The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. Big question: What affects how long it takes a swing to go back and forth? In the lab today, we began by watching a YouTube video comparing the rates at which a bowling ball and feathers fall. I noticed that when the two objects were falling through the air, the feathers fell at a slower rate than the bowling ball, because the air resistance force was acting upon the gravity. Then, the two objects were dropped in a completely vacuum-sealed room with no air, and we observed that gravity acted upon both objects at the same rate, resulting in the objects falling at the same speed. We then looked at the week 8 homework and had a text rendering discussion. We picked a sentence, phrase, and word that had meaning to us individually, and then shared the ideas with my table group. Then, as a whole class, we discussed every group's list, revealing the core ideas we took away from this article.  As a tab...

  1. The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. In the lab this week, the big question addressed was "How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?" Our focus for the lab was still directed towards the question "What affects a rider’s speed down a slide?" We began by examining the forces at play and how gravity affects the speed of a rider. Then we examined how friction affects a rider's speed while going down a slide. Our class was then split into two groups that would further investigate friction and weight, and their effects on the speed of a rider. We conducted this investigation by using different AI tools to investigate friction. We figured out lesson plan ideas for 5th-grade students to help them understand friction. AI was able to provide us with valuable information about friction and help us understand how to effectively implement a lesson on friction for 5th-grade students. However, we noticed that AI doesn...

1. What is the big question addressed in the lab, and what did you do in the lab? Today in the lab, we designed and conducted an investigation using slides that focused on the steepness variable. Our table group came up with a hypothesis that steepness affects the speed of an object; the steeper a slide is, the faster an object's speed will be. We tested our claim by using 2 dependent variables: the Golf ball and the length of the ramp, and 1 independent variable: the steepness of the ramp. We changed the steepness to four different levels and recorded how fast the ball traveled. We found that the steepest ramp had a time of .63 seconds, the steep ramp had a time of 1.13 seconds, the less steep ramp had a time of 1.20 seconds, and the least steep ramp had a time of 2.45 seconds. We know that the faster an object travels, the less amount of time it takes, helping us understand that speed relates to time, and steepness relates to speed. Therefore, we found out from our recorded data ...