My Golf Tower Challenge:
My Egg Drop Challenge:
Curricular Response
After completing my two labs, I now understand the scientific method. Before these projects, I had never made observations, or written hypotheses, or even conclusions based on data I found. Since creating my two successful labs, I am now able to identify problems, create a hypothesis, conduct an experiment, and write a conclusion. The unit on scientific method had helped me understand science more and it has given me a way of demonstrating my thinking and learning.
Core Competency Self Assessment and Creative Thinking
I am most proud of my egg drop lab. I am most proud of it because I have done the experiment a could times before throughout elementary and middle school and in all of them my egg did not survive. I am especially happy about this lab because it was the highest height I had done the experiment from. I also finally found a design of device that can protect an egg.
To overcome the many challenges I ran into during the two experiments I had a couple tactics. First, I would step away from the lab and observe what the issue was and how I could fix it. I would then explain to my partner how we could fix it all while listen to their ideas on how we could solve the issue. Lastly, I would come back to the lab and attempt to solve the issue based on my partner and I ideas. An example of when this happened was during the Golf Ball Tower Challenge. When we were trying to add more height, our tower started to lean and become less sturdy. My partner and I took a step away from the project and noticed that a support beam had become un-attached from the base. With a quick fix , we were back to adding height to our tower.
I had a great time during both of these labs and during the scientific method unit. I learned how to properly exercise labs. I learned how to write hypothesis’ correctly using “If” and “Then” statements, to writing conclusions and stating if my hypothesis was supported or not. I also learned and worked on using my observation skills. I learned about qualitative and quantitative qualities and deductible learning.
A) I demonstrated I could create new things when I I made both my golf ball tower and egg drop device. I was faced with the challenge of limited building supplies but I was able to incorporate the supplies in useful ways. For example, for the golf ball tower the teams were only given 10 sheets of news paper and 50 cm of tape. In addition, when making the egg drop device we were only given 1 sheet of news paper, 1 cardboard square, 1 foot of tape, 3 straws, and 1 sheet of paper. It was a challenge building both creations with such limited supplies, but it show cased I could create new things.
B) I demonstrated I could build on the ideas of others when, during the golf ball tower challenge I was looking about the lab and looking at others creations. Some of the towers were very tall, others were quite short, but there were all a lot around the height of my teams tower. We used the similar heighted towers as motivation to try to add just a little more height to our tower.
C) An example of setbacks and failures during the scientific method labs would be, for my group during the golf ball tower challenge. We observed that many of the other teams, with taller towers, were using a cone shaped method, which used a lot of paper. My tower had a very strong, triangular shaped base when the taller towers did not, but our based used up a lot of paper. If I ever do this lab again, I would try to conserve the amount paper I use for the base, and try to use that extra paper to give my tower more height.