Golf tower Ball Launcher
Curricular Response:
After each lab, my understanding of the scientific method has improved greatly because after my first experiment (golf tower), I learned two things through testing and seeing. The first being in the testing phase, always seek out the flaws. In the golf tower challenge my partner and I encountered our tower sections were uneven. which made it lean and the golf ball just falling through the tower. The second being never get lazy with your design. This is because we got lazy in some parts of our design which made our tower have0 flaws in the part we got lazy on.
With my second experiment (ball launcher) I applied these things I learned from my last experiment. Although it wasn’t perfect and still had flaws, my group and I fixed majority of the issues to where we had good results. Our main issues being not being able to aim where the ball went and the consistency of the distance it went.
Core Competency Self Assessment and Creative Thinking
Why is it Important to Celebrate our accomplishments:
I believe its important to celebrate our accomplishments because it build confidence in yourself and classmates and pushes you to reach for a bigger goal next time. The Lab I’m most proud of is the ball launcher because my teammates and I had a better understanding of what to look for and do, which made us confident in our design.
What Strategies did you use to Overcome those Challenges:
Some strategies I used to overcome those challenges were using inductive learning to seek out the flaws of our design. Then used deductive learning to see if our solutions to our flaws worked. Another strategy my group used is brainstorming new ideas if our original planned wouldn’t work.
Describe your experience with understanding of the Scientific Method doing the 2 labs?:
my experience with the scientific method through labs bettered my understanding, through talking with classmates and teammates about our designs and hypothesis. This has helped me a lot with remembering each step and my general understanding of the scientific method
Tell me how you did the following:
A) I demonstrated that I can create new things when I my teammates during both labs were stuck on a issue and brainstormed new ideas and combined our ideas with classmates designs. for example, on our ball launcher we were stuck on how to plant the launcher onto the cardboard, so we took a look around the class and inspired our tape design off another groups.
B) I demonstrated that I can build on the ideas of others when my friend and I were doing the golf tower challenge. We both had different ideas on how to make it as tall as possible. But with lots of brainstorming and final tweaks, we came up with our design.
C) When trying new things, I expect setbacks and failure and use them to develop my ideas. An example of this from the Scientific Method labs would be when we did our golf tower. We expected setbacks because of the inconsistency of the tubes building up and the base leaning one way a bit more. But we resolved this problem by leaning the tower the other way to act as a counter balance. For the inconsistent tubes we just rerolled them until it was stable enough to gold the golf ball.