Week One for Science Methods II

 What question are we investigating?

For the first week of Science Methods II, we would look at the question: “How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?”. We also would look at “ How do we make a race exciting between people who run at different speeds?”. We did this through talking in small groups about the different things we saw on the video on the playground. Then we would share our thoughts in a whole group before going again in small groups for testing races between each other. 

What did we do in lab to investigate this question?

The teacher explained we would be finding out how to get two individuals in our small groups to finish at the same time with different speeds. Then he would put us together with another small group to get one person from each small group to stop at the same time with different speeds. My small group would create a method on finding a way to get both individuals to stop at the same time based on their different speeds. We did this first by measuring out the length the walkers would be going. Then individually we would measure with a stopwatch the person’s speed based on how fast or slow they walked through the length of the distance they went. The next person would go and we would measure a person’s speed for the same distance. Finally, we would do the math to calculate how much more seconds the person would need to finish at the same time. We would do the same calculations with the other small group we were assigned with to see if our results worked or not. 

What did we figure out?

Another important part would be in the lecture and talking about speed, distance, or time throughout the class period. We would learn more about Next Generation Science Standards and how it connected to the experiment we did with the races. This would be helpful to think about it as a future educator and think about it when teaching science to my future students. It also would be important to see how distance and speed are different from each other. An example of this can be the problem about Jeff riding a bike and his wife driving the car to ask how to get him home earlier than his wife. 

What are new or remaining questions after the investigation? 

This lab taught me more about the differences about the different terms that can be used in science. Some examples of this can be distance, speed, velocity, and acceleration. This would be done through doing the experiment in the discussion part of the class and talking more about it in lecture. Lastly, the textbook would help me to see how the terms are similar but have differences. A question I still have is how velocity and acceleration work together.