Archive for September, 2007

Day 31: Lab Reports »

Today was the final day of the experimental design project and lab reports were due in class today.  With homecoming coming to a close, the day was very busy, but a lot got done.
All lab reports for all hours (regardless of whether or not class met today) are due today.  Remember - even for 6th […]

Day 30: Writing a Lab Report - Day 2 »

Today we continued typing our formal lab reports to document the details of the loop plane experiment we conducted over the last few days.  Students were reminded to format the report as shown in the third handout (How to Write a Lab Report).  Students had the full hour today to type the report, save it […]

Day 29: Writing a Lab Report - Day 1 »

All lab groups should have data recorded from the loop plane experiment. By today, each individual should have a graph completed demonstrating a relationship between two variables in their experiment, be it speed and distance, distance and time, speed and trials, etc…
Today was the first of three days we will spend working with the […]

Day 28: Experimental Design - Day 3 »

Students started today by brainstorming how they could represent their experimental data in graphical form. Students were encouraged to come up with the graph that would best describe their data - be it a bar graph, line graph, or pie chart. We then discussed which would best suit the different possible experiment scenarios […]

Day 27: Experimental Design - Day 2 »

Continuing with the theme from Friday, students worked today to complete their experimental design proposals.  These proposals included a problem statement, hypothesis, description of the variables involved, and a detailed procedure they planned to follow.  Upon completion, the experimental design was approved and students then moved on to Step Two:  Conducting the Experiment.  After constructing […]

Day 26: Experimental Design - Day 1 »

Today was the first of six days spent designing an experiment.  Taking into account all we’ve done thus far through the year, students will work in groups of three to design, conduct, and properly document an experiment centered around a small paper loop plane.
Our starting point for today was to construct the “standard” loop plane, […]

Day 25: Accuracy & Precision »

The last several days of science have been filled with math - from scientific notation to significant figures to today’s quiz over the two topics. Today we finally wrapped up that portion of this unit and moved on to defining accuracy and precision. By tying these terms in with the use and importance […]

Day 24: Significant Figures - Day 2 »

For the second day, we discussed the importance of significant figures in science. We started today by reviewing the definition and how to determine when a value is significant or not. We then covered two new rules: how many significant figures is our answer allowed to have when we 1) Add or […]

Day 23: Significant Figures - Day 1 »

After briefly discussing the information we learned Friday regarding scientific notation (this will be on a quiz on Thursday!) we then began working with an entirely new idea: Significant Figures. Whenever scientists are conveying measurements or other quantities, they want to be sure they are reporting the appropriate level of certainty in their […]

Day 22: Scientific Notation »

Today’s objectives included defining “scientific notation”, analyzing the importance and usefulness of this system, and learning the rules to convert large and small numbers into and out of scientific notation.  We started the class by taking some guided notes on the properties of Scientific Notation.  To see all of today’s slides, download the Scientific Notation […]