Entry 1: First 2 weeks

 

Overall Findings

The Pendulum Lab

These first few weeks have been interesting. To begin with, we met our teacher and he is nice. His  curriculum criteria is great also, we just have to learn the material, which is way better than at my home school. Although with that change comes a very fast pace. Not even the first real week of school and we are already doing labs. They were very simple and mainly were about measuring but still. Our findings, however, were conclusive (for the most part). Almost every single experiment had some sort of correlation, the only exception was with the pendulum experiment. 

Our very first lab (The Hexnut Lab)

The Issuses
There were a couple of very prevalent issues. For instance, since we could not calculate any numbers there were plenty of systematic errors and inaccuracies. That might have thrown off our data marginally but it all seemed to work out. Next, is the fact that when we did our white board discussions for the first time I had an issue jumping into the conversation, as did some other kids. Also, after a while it seemed to get a little repetitive and a little of task. Finally, my class seemed a bit rushed which might have negatively affected the data.


What we learned
We did learn a lot during these labs. For instance, we learned that while data is important it is not the end all be all when it comes to deciding what is the line of best fit. In addition to that, we learned the difference between human error and systematic error (one can be prevented the other can't). In addition to that we  learned something to counteract that, the 5% rule. It states that if you take the y intercept and divide it by the largest y value and its percent is lower than 5 then the data can be trusted. Another consensus was that the point (0,0) should be added to the data if makes sense to do so. Finally, we learned that while our experiments were valid, it wouldn't hurt to do a couple of tests on the very extreme ends of the scale. All of these points were made in the white board circles we made.

Things that could be changed
With the way the labs were conducted (nothing but measuring) I would personally like to see that change. In addition to that having a three days to do all the experiments would not be a bad idea. Finally, maybe a little more group bonding would be beneficial to both students and teachers.

Other things that went on
Another thing that went on included a packet, that in my opinion was difficult especially to explain. It did however, make me and a lot of other kids actually think outside the box (literally). It also taught us about trends, how they look on graphs, their equations, etc. This led into a slightly complicated discussion about our findings, especially when some people forgot to do the paper. Non-the-less, everything worked out quite nicely. The other things that went on were discussions about the concepts we have to learn and these blogs. I enjoyed these things because I was able to hop to another table and meet some great new people and get some great ideas for these blogs, which I hope it in cooperate into the next ones.

The Labs Themselves

My group didn't get to all the labs and we didn't discuss them all in class however here are the ones that we did get to and a basic over view of them...

 

Circle Lab 1: It wanted to know the relation between a circle's diameter and its circumference. I found the there was a quadratic relationship here, however, everyone else got linear and different slopes, so that was interesting

 

Circle Lab 2:The next lab wanted to know the relationship between a circle's radius and area. I found that while a cubic relationship worked best with the numbers a quadratic was almost as good, but the strange part was that everyone else went with a linear design.

 

The Hex Nut Lab: It wanted to know the relationship between a set of hex nuts/ petered dish and the  mass of it all. Here, everyone got almost the same equations 7x+14.9 , which does make sense, but the important part was that we explained have a Y intercept could be explained here.

 

The Rod Lab: This wanted to know the relationship between a wooden rods mass to its length. The anomaly that occurred here was that while everybody got a linear equation the slopes were all completely different. That led us to explanations of this, like the size of the base, density, etc.

 

The Lever Lab: For this lab it wanted to know the distance of varying masses from to fulcrum needed in order to balance the lever. In this lab I went against my group and came up with a decaying inverse formula. I suspect that so did a couple of other groups had this conclusion too.

 

The Pendulum Lab: Finally, this lab wanted to know if the mass of a pendulum affected the time needed to swing from side to side (one period). The thing that stood out in this lab was that for our group there was no correlation at all, we also couldn't really come up with a reason why either, because we retested.