Maddy's Elementary Science Methods II Blog

Lab:       This week in lab we finished up our investigation on why we need to push a child on a swing to keep them going and how if they don't have a push, eventually they will run out of energy. We used a pendulum simulation to explore this idea more and noticed that the thermal energy or friction is what is slowing the pendulum down. We used an air particle model of the pendulum colliding with the air particles around it and discussed that as the pendulum collides with the air particles around it, it speeds them up while slowing the pendulum down, transferring energy from the pendulum to the air.       We then moved on to our last investigation of the physics module, how can we design a safe and durable playground surface? The first thing we did was use the engineering design process, and explored at all the different materials people have already used to create these surfaces. From those ideas, we gathered materials and began brainstorming wit...

Lab:      At the beginning of lab this week we began where we left off in lecture last week talking about friction. We used an example of a baby going down a slide with 3 different points on the slide. With those points we had to draw the forces that were acting upon them and the two that were actively moving had friction, gravity, and normal force acting on all of them. We talked about how the friction force is drawn in the opposite direction of the object, gravity is always straight down, and the normal force is always perpendicular to the surface. We then moved to talking about our next investigation of what affects how long it takes for a swing to go back and forth.  My group decided to investigate the variable of how far the swing is being pulled back. We used a string with weights attached at the bottom to simulate our swing and rider. Our string was attached to a rod to simulate a swing on a playground. We used a protractor to measure different angels we held ...

Lab:  Our Data On a Graph      This week in lab, we delved into what different variables affect the speed of a rider going down a slide. Before we began our investigation as a class we came up with different variables that we thought might affect the riders speed. Some of those variables include weight of the rider, height of slide, shape of slide, materials being sat on etc. Our group decided to investigate whether the height of the slide would affect the riders speed. Through our different trials we found that the higher the slide was, the faster the marble went down. This was true for the other group who also investigated how height affected the speed of the rider but it was also cool to listen to what other groups investigated, and what their results were.  Lecture:       In lecture we continued to talk about the variables that could affect a riders speed down a slide. We talked more about the height of a slide and how as riders move down...

Lab:       Today, we continued our thinking about how we can support play that is exciting but not dangerous. We narrowed in on how we can make a race exciting between people who run at different speeds and started by watching a video of "The Freeze" racing fans but giving each of them a head start. Each race he caught up to his opponent and ended up beating them in every clip of the video. We used the video as an example for our big question and inquiry for the day. We were asked to use our model of a race to develop a method to ensure that a race is exciting between two racers. Our groups thinking was that we needed to calculate our distance per second so that when we were matched up against our opponent, we can calculate the distance head start that they would need for the race to be a close call.  Our Data Table      Based off of our calculations we multiplied them by the race length to figure out how long each racer would take to complete the...