Week Four for Science Methods II

 What question are we investigating?

For the fourth 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 “What affects how long it takes a swing to go back and forth?”. We did this through talking in small groups about the different things that could affect the swing 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 different factors that could affect a swing. Then as a whole group we would write down are thoughts over what could affect a swing. Some of the examples include length, weight, push or pull, and weather like wind. My small group would choose to experiment how pushing and pulling affects the swing. My group's initial thinking was that pulling would go faster compared to pushing. We thought that pulling would give it more speed compared to pushing. We would do three trials of the swing and then calculate the average of its totals. We would find that pushing would be faster than pulling. All my group members would be surprised by these results. This would allow us to think about why pushing is faster compared to pulling. We concluded that pushing doesn’t have as much distance for once compared to pulling and made it go faster. 

What did we figure out?

Another important part would be in lecture where we would explore previous and new information. This would be done through talking more about the experiments from the previous class period and talking about Newton’s two laws affecting swings. We did this through talking in small groups about why rider weight doesn’t matter for a swing or how the length of the swing does matter. This would help to learn new concepts and how Newton’s laws affect how the swing goes in the experiments. An example of this can be the car and motorcycle racing together. This would allow me to see how Newton’s second law works. It was shown that Newton’s second law is that larger masses are harder to accelerate and this would be shown within that video. 

What are new or remaining questions after the investigation? 

This lab taught me more about different concepts that are important in physics like Newton’s two laws. This would be done through doing the experiments in discussion to see how a swing works. It also would be shown through lecture and explaining this more with Newton’s two laws. I would say that this new information gave me a clearer understanding of how swings work. Lastly, it would allow me to revisit information talk in previous classes like how weight doesn’t affect things like slides or swings.