Bailie Kroll- Science Methods

      Week 5: Playground Surfaces Big Q of the Week : The big question that we are investigating this week is how can we design a safe and durable playground surface. We were tasked with creating a surface that is safe for an egg to drop one meter above and not crack. We used the engineering design process to come up with a solution, test our product, and revise. My group started with a sand and straw mixture with wood chips on top. While the egg did not break on initial impact, it bounced out of our bowl and cracked on the ground. To revise, we decided to create a softer surface with a majority of the bowl filled with straw and the rubber wood chips on top. However we ran into the same problem as before. Finally, we did a majority of the bowl filled with sand, placed plastic wrap down, and filled the top with straw. We found success with this surface and the egg did not bounce out of the bowl. We concluded that too much force would break the egg, there had to be somewher...

     Week 4: Rider Weight and Swings Big Q of the Week : The big questions that we are investigating is what affects a riders speed when going down the slide, and why do things fall at different rates, and our investigative question was does wind affect the objects time to swing back and forth. We revisited our learning from last week during our investigations on factors that affect a riders speed down a slide. The forces that are acting on a rider as they go down a slide is gravity, friction, and the surface. We noticed that when the rider was in motion, the object was experiencing the force of the slide which is the surface, and that can affect the speed of the rider. Then, we looked at the rate at which objects fall. We first investigated the rate of a piece of paper falling compared to a tennis ball, to no surprise the tennis ball won. Then, we crumpled the piece of paper into a ball the size of the tennis ball and found that the balls were close to falling at the sam...

    Week 3: Slide Times Big Q of the Week : The big question that we are still investigating is how can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous. To explore this question, we looked at different variables that affect a riders speed while going down a slide. As a class, we came up with a different variable to test, my group decided to test if the wetness of the slide affects the riders speed. The big question we investigated was, if the slide is wet, how does that affect the speed of a rider going down the slide? We started by setting up our slide on the window sill to create a ramp and used a toy car as our rider. We did four trials of "dry" slides and then four trials of "wet" slides. To create the wet slide, we poured 50 mL of water down the ramp and then let the car go down the slide. At the end, we averaged out the times of the two different conditions and found that the dry slide time was 2.47 sec. and the wet slide time was 2.06 sec. In conclusion, w...