Week 2 Science Methods II

 The big question addressed in lab, and a description of what you did. What affects a rider’s speed down a slide? Create a fair test of your variable, gather evidence to support a claim about how your variable affects the speed of a rider.  

This week we were told to pick a grade level and then decide what we would remove/add from our bucket of things for our students to experiment on based on their grade level. We decided to remove the mouse trap, rubber band, and the balloon. We wanted to add a bowl, pinwheel, and a golf ball. We then had to decide how we would organize the examples of motion worksheet for this grade level. We decided to add a graph to make it more organized and easier to read/use.

We also had to pick a variable to test for things that can affect the speed of going down a slide. We chose to experiment with weight. We chose 3 different weights of blocks to go down the slide. We all guessed that the heavier block would be the fastest, but it ended up not being the fastest. We think this is because of the length of the slide we had. We believe that if our slide was a bit longer, the heavier block would've been the fastest. 

 A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture.

    In Thursday's lecture we learned about the different directions of force, and we learned about the soccer ball examples where if a soccer ball is sitting on a table the soccer ball is being pull down because of gravity, but the table is technically pushing force back up at the soccer ball because of the weight that the soccer ball is pushing into the table.

Answer questions about the weekly textbook reading:

1. 1. What did you learn? I learned that to make an object move, you need force. A force can be a push, pull, spin, bounce, throw, kick, drop, etc. I also learned that even if something isn't moving, it still has forces acting on it at all times. 
   2. What was most helpful? The tug of war example was very helpful when explaining what makes something move. 
   3. What do you need more information on? Something that I feel I need more information on is the fact that things still have forces acting on them even when they aren't moving. It is hard for me to picture things that I can't see with my own eyes. 
   4. What questions/concerns/comments do you have? None as of now, but I am sure that will change soon!