Week 5 for Science Methods II

 What question are we investigating?

For the fifth week of Science Methods II, we would continue to ask the question: “How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?”. We also would look at “How can we design a safe and durable playground surface”? We did this through talking in small groups about the different things that could affect a surface for playgrounds and create an experiment based on this information.

What did we do in lab to investigate this question?

The teacher would start out by allowing everyone in small groups to talk about the different materials that could be used for a surface on playgrounds and think about what materials we may use to not make the egg break. Then as a whole group we would get soil, sand, straw, and tire pieces to put into the bowl. My small group would choose to do 1 meter and measure that to see if the egg would break or not with the amounts of different surfaces we put in the bowl. The first meter wouldn’t break the egg. This would allow my group to do 2 meters with the surfaces and bowl to see if the egg would break or not. However, with 2 meters the egg would break and then we would talk about why this happened. My whole group’s initial thoughts would be “there wasn’t enough opposing force to absorb the kinetic energy from where the egg was dropped at the 2 meters, because the energy wasn’t absorbed it kept moving until too much force acted on it”. 

What did we figure out?

Another important part would be again in discussion and learning about Newton’s third law. This would be done after all the experiments and conversations were complete. It would be shown that Newton’s third law is that forces come in equal pairs. This would be demonstrated by showing a video over eggs dropping on a surface. It would allow me to see that the first egg broke because there was too much force and it broke that egg within that video. The second egg would show that the egg didn’t break because the egg gradually slowed down and had a smaller force on the surface towards the end. This would allow the egg to not break and allow me to learn why at 2 meters my group’s egg broke and show that within are surfaces there was too much force when the egg went down on 2 meters. My group said that if we put more sand into the mixture it would allow the egg to have more gradually slowing down and it wouldn’t have broke at 2 meters. 

What are new or remaining questions after the investigation? 

This lab taught me more about Newton’s third law. This would allow me to see why it’s important in physics and to teach my students in the future. This would be done through doing the experiment of the egg with the different surfaces and mixtures to see how it breaks or not. It also would help me to have a discussion in class and see videos to get more of a visual on how this happens in real life.