Mallory Lange- Elementary Science Methods II

          This week, we focused on what playground surfaces would be safe for kids to play on. We were given an egg and told to make a surface that would prevent the egg from cracking after dropping it by 1 meter, and then 2 meters. The surface we decided to go with was straw and sand. At first, we put a lot of sand with a little bit of straw, and the egg bounced off and landed on the floor and cracked. After that, we took more sand out and added more straw. We then got a new egg to try again. This caused a safer landing for the egg with both heights of drops!      On Thursday we will take a test on the entire unit we have just learned. Therefore, I feel that this is going to wrap up and summarize everything we have done so far this semester. It is going to be a little bit of a reminder of everything we have learned since the first week. It is going to go over everything we have discussed in the lab and lectures, and in the experiments w...

In the lab, my group and I constructed an experiment on the difference in the pace of swings when it came to the length of the rope/chain. The experiment consisted of three different sizes of string- 6 inches, 10 inches, and 17 inches. Each of these strings had the same amount of weight on the end. What we did was choose the amount of swings they did back and forth and time how long that took them to do. The amount of swings we decided to do was 4 and 6 swings.  What we came to find out was that the shorter the rope, the faster the rider is going to swing. We then created a graph and graphed all the data shown, which showed the difference between the ropes and the different amount of swing trials we did.      I know we discussed this in the lab on Tuesday, but Thursday’s lecture helped me understand the relationship between weight and gravity. You would think that an object that is of heavier weight would swing and go down a slide faster, but that is not th...

In the lab this week, we discussed the variables of what can make children move faster or slower down a slide. My group’s big question that we experimented on was- Does rider weight affect the speed of the rider down the slide? This experiment consisted of us using a wood panel as our slide and three different weighted marbles made of cork, aluminum, and brass. Brass was the heaviest (73.3 grams),  while aluminum (22.7 grams)  was next, with cork (2.3 grams) being the lightest. What we found through three different trial runs was that brass went the fastest with an average of 1.44 seconds, aluminum with 1.48 seconds, and cork marble was the slowest with an average of 1.55 seconds. What we found from this experiment was the conclusion that the ride weight does affect the speed of the rider going down the slide because the average time was faster as the weight went up, but it was not as drastic of a difference as we believed it would be.  On Thursday, we had a lecture and w...

In the lab, our big question was discussing how we would decide when to let the Freeze begin to run when racing against the fan picked from the crowd. What our group decided to do was have two people walk and compare their times with meters per second. We picked our tallest and shortest people in the group, and found that the taller girl was walking at a meter per second. We did it at 8 meters, and that is the result we found. Then, when deciding how we should race and when we should have our group member leave compared to the other group’s member was by measurements and not by time. We had Nicole, our group member, leave right away, and the other group’s person left after Nicole had walked a couple of meters, and they ended at the same time!  I was not able to attend Thursday’s lecture, but I had a chance to go over the annotated slides and learn all about what the lecture was about! This lecture was about describing motion, what students should know and do, and how to measure mot...