Experimental Design B/C

[Phenylethylamine]

Phenyl: what would you think of (in addition to your interpretation of NC's event) asking questions about "landmark" experiments in various fields? idk, just brainstorming.

Eh, I feel like that would require students to know details of too many different experiments. I like the idea of using the actual content of "landmark" experiments in the questions, though – e.g., you're given the background of Rutherford's gold foil experiment, and based on that, you have to answer the kind of questions I talked about before.

[Slarik]

Phenyl: what would you think of (in addition to your interpretation of NC's event) asking questions about "landmark" experiments in various fields? idk, just brainstorming.

Eh, I feel like that would require students to know details of too many different experiments. I like the idea of using the actual content of "landmark" experiments in the questions, though – e.g., you're given the background of Rutherford's gold foil experiment, and based on that, you have to answer the kind of questions I talked about before.

What if there was a published list of experiments to know?

[Phenylethylamine]

Phenyl: what would you think of (in addition to your interpretation of NC's event) asking questions about "landmark" experiments in various fields? idk, just brainstorming.

Eh, I feel like that would require students to know details of too many different experiments. I like the idea of using the actual content of "landmark" experiments in the questions, though – e.g., you're given the background of Rutherford's gold foil experiment, and based on that, you have to answer the kind of questions I talked about before.

What if there was a published list of experiments to know?

I don't know. I'm just not sure how much that would add to the event.

[nejanimb]

@Phenylethylamine, you're right that I did have to quantify deliciousness – Gave them all deliciousness scores, otherwise the best that could be done would be sorting them from best to worst, which, though it can tell you something about "optimum cookie design," doesn't illuminate much about factor effects, which is the main purpose of that experiment if you want to inform any future work on it.

I do actually like the format you were discussing. Those sorts of stations could be part of the test I was suggesting as a supplement, or those and a test could supplant the part where you actually even do and write the lab (the skills of writing a lab could also be evaluated section by section in those stations). Though I understand the desire to have students see a lab from beginning to end, I don't know how you can ever get around the problem of it being so much easier and so much more effective to make up data and to bend the experiment to be the way you want it.

[JustDroobles]

Those ideas might be better incorporated if the event was designed so that competitors had to complete an experiment before competition. At competition the teams could turn in a lab report and take a test on experimental design and famous experiments. A huge problem with this set-up would be possible dishonesty with the actual completion of an experiment. However, higher scores would still be given to team that understand important concepts of experimental design and incorporate them into their report. Perhaps it would even be allowable to write-up a fictional experiment for the purposes of this event. Otherwise, an interview (similar to Sounds of Music) could be conducted to make sure the students were involved in and understood their experiment, or some sort of presentation with pictures or video could be turned in.

[Phenylethylamine]

Those ideas might be better incorporated if the event was designed so that competitors had to complete an experiment before competition. At competition the teams could turn in a lab report and take a test on experimental design and famous experiments. A huge problem with this set-up would be possible dishonesty with the actual completion of an experiment. However, higher scores would still be given to team that understand important concepts of experimental design and incorporate them into their report. Perhaps it would even be allowable to write-up a fictional experiment for the purposes of this event. Otherwise, an interview (similar to Sounds of Music) could be conducted to make sure the students were involved in and understood their experiment, or some sort of presentation with pictures or video could be turned in.

Yeah, I was also considering this kind of setup. Having to do an experiment beforehand and present it at the competition would have some advantages in terms of creativity/student input/freedom, but would present major logistical issues in scoring and so on. I suppose the rules would have to include some guidelines of what your experiment would have to contain... This would be an improvement over the current setup, but I'm not sure it's ideal.

[butter side up]

Those ideas might be better incorporated if the event was designed so that competitors had to complete an experiment before competition. At competition the teams could turn in a lab report and take a test on experimental design and famous experiments. A huge problem with this set-up would be possible dishonesty with the actual completion of an experiment. However, higher scores would still be given to team that understand important concepts of experimental design and incorporate them into their report. Perhaps it would even be allowable to write-up a fictional experiment for the purposes of this event. Otherwise, an interview (similar to Sounds of Music) could be conducted to make sure the students were involved in and understood their experiment, or some sort of presentation with pictures or video could be turned in.

Yeah, I was also considering this kind of setup. Having to do an experiment beforehand and present it at the competition would have some advantages in terms of creativity/student input/freedom, but would present major logistical issues in scoring and so on. I suppose the rules would have to include some guidelines of what your experiment would have to contain... This would be an improvement over the current setup, but I'm not sure it's ideal.

Not to mention the fact that people might view the presentation as more of a public speaking type event than a pure science one.
I suppose if a turned-in lab report included pictures of the students performing the experiment, then that would at least reduce the chance for dishonesty, but would still be very difficult to grade. When you consider how long it takes to do in the current format, which is fairly brief and very structured, and then consider how much longer it would take with a formal lab report, which is likely to be much longer, and much more detailed and involved, it becomes a logistical nightmare.

[awesome90220]

Hey, for all of you that went to nationals, what the heck were you supposed to do for your experiment? I thought we did well and we got .............. 30th

[awesome90220]

Hey who was in teams 21-30? Yeah the event supervisor was great wasn't she? Yeah, eating lunch and watching a video at most likely full volume is the BEST thing to do while kids are taking a test, very smart.

[Slarik]

Hey who was in teams 21-30? Yeah the event supervisor was great wasn't she? Yeah, eating lunch and watching a video at most likely full volume is the BEST thing to do while kids are taking a test, very smart.

Good night she had a lot of caffeine or something! I think she was the most memorable event supervisor.

[Emerald Lily]

I personally didn't like this year's Div B experiment -- testing pH of different liquids. To me, it doesn't really feel like an "experiment". You're not really finding an correlation between one factor and another, but instead just finding specific characteristic properties of different items. Also, there isn't a good hypothesis or a good rationale to go with it. Mainly you're guessing what the pH of -- let's say apple juice -- is, or if you've done something similar in science before, you put down the number that you already know is the pH of apple juice.

[siciscio]

I agree. There really isn't any good experiment that could go along with that. My team didn't do that. That wasn't very successful Just wondering for that kind of experiment, what would you put as the dependent and independent variables. You could sourness as the iv and pH as the dv but how would you have different levels of the iv? Thanks.

[Emerald Lily]

I agree. There really isn't any good experiment that could go along with that. My team didn't do that. That wasn't very successful Just wondering for that kind of experiment, what would you put as the dependent and independent variables. You could sourness as the iv and pH as the dv but how would you have different levels of the iv? Thanks.

If I remember correctly, we were given purified water, apple juice, Sprite, and lemonade. I don't think we were allowed to taste the liquids as a part of the experiment. (She said we could drink them after we were done testing if we wanted.) Sourness wouldn't exactly work for these materials since Sprite and apple juice aren't sour at all. If the supervisor said you could do a taste test, I guess the best way would be to assign numbers to how sour it is. For example, lemonade might be a 4 on a scale of 0-5, while apple juice would be -- well, a 0. At nationals, we did the standard pH vs. type of liquid and we made it into the top 10.

[awesome90220]

I agree. There really isn't any good experiment that could go along with that. My team didn't do that. That wasn't very successful Just wondering for that kind of experiment, what would you put as the dependent and independent variables. You could sourness as the iv and pH as the dv but how would you have different levels of the iv? Thanks.

If I remember correctly, we were given purified water, apple juice, Sprite, and lemonade. I don't think we were allowed to taste the liquids as a part of the experiment. (She said we could drink them after we were done testing if we wanted.) Sourness wouldn't exactly work for these materials since Sprite and apple juice aren't sour at all. If the supervisor said you could do a taste test, I guess the best way would be to assign numbers to how sour it is. For example, lemonade might be a 4 on a scale of 0-5, while apple juice would be -- well, a 0. At nationals, we did the standard pH vs. type of liquid and we made it into the top 10.

That's almost what we did, comparing the ingredients of the liquid to the ph of the liquid, and as I said before, we got 30th

[CulturallyScientific]

Does anyone know any good biology tests for ED?