Faith Rinehart: Elementary Science Methods 2 Blog

The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. This week in the lab we had presentations about different parts of the universe. First we learned about the origin of the universe. The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Then we learned about life cycles of stars. A cool fact about stars was that the bigger a star is the shorter its lifespan. Then we moved onto learning about galaxies. We learned that there are three types of galaxies, spiral, elliptical, and irregular. We also learned about the origin of the earth. We learned that the earth has many layers including the crust, the mantle, and the core. Black holes was the next topic we learned about. Black holes are formed when a star is at the end of its lifespan. Lastly we learned about the exploration of space. I thought that it was interesting to hear that women should have the ones going to space for many different reasons but we used to not be allowed. A description of what you learned in Thursday's ...

The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. With your group members, physically BUILD, using whatever you have access too, a scale model of the sun and the 4 inner planets. Include the moon (our moon). How big is the solar system? To answer this big question we built a model of the solar system. We included the sun, moon and 4 inner planets. We were told this to scale. So we had to figure out the appropriate size that our planets needed to be to be able to fit within our distance we had. We started out by making the planets pretty big but realized that the scale was to big and we did not have enough room to spread all of the planets out as they should have been. For example the earth was the size of a grape. But after we started over and made our planets a lot smaller we were able to fit everything. These were the size comparisons for the planets: Sun: head of lettuce  Moon: grain of salt  Earth: mustard seed  Venus: a little bit bigger than ...

  What is your best understanding about? How do the phases of the moon occur? Throughout the month the moon is moving around the earth and changing the shape of the moon  What causes the seasons? Seasons change based on the earth's rotations around the sun and the axis.  What causes a lunar eclipse?  The sun and moon cross paths. The sun goes in front of the moon.  The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. There were three big questions that we talked about in the lab. The first one was, how do the phases of the moon occur? To answer this question we used a globe, flashlight and ball to look at the different moon phases. We were able to move the ball around the earth to see this. The second question was, what causes the seasons? We learned the seasons all depend on the earth's axis as it goes around the sun. The final question was, what causes a lunar eclipse? To answer this question we also used the light, globe and ball. We were...

 In this week's lab we wrapped up our thoughts about swings from last week. We learned that pendulums collide with air particles, speeding them up and slowing down the pendulum. These collisions transfer energy from the pendulum to the air. This week our big question was, how can we design a safe and durable playground surface? To test this question we developed surfaces made out of different materials and dropped an egg on these surfaces to see if it would crack. If the egg cracked we knew that the surface was too hard for children to be playing on.  Test 1:  For our first test we place sand, saran wrap, hay, and then rubber in a bowl we tested to see if their mixture of material would make a good surface first by using a tennis ball. We held the tennis ball up 1 meter over the bowl and dropped it. We thought that this mixture would be good, so we moved onto dropping the eggs. The egg did not crack when it fell into the bowl but the egg did bounce out and cracked on the ...

  The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. Our big question in the lab was, what affects how long it takes a swing to go back and forth? Before answering this question in the lab we reviewed our last two questions. We reviewed the different definitions of speed, velocity, and acceleration.  Speed: fast distance over time  Velocity: How fast it goes in certain direction  Acceleration: How quickly you speed up With these terms we were able to review what effect a sliders speed on a slide. We found that clothing/surface does affect the speed when going down a slide. The material sometimes causes friction which can cause a rider to slow down. We also reviewed that weight did not have an effect on rider speed.  Moving onto this week, we discussed what would change the speed of a swing. My group decided to see how the length of the swing chain affects how long it takes to swing back and forth. We found that the shorter the swing chain ...

The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. Our big question from this week's lab was, what affects a rider’s speed down a slide? With this question in our minds we made a list of variables that we could test to see what the effects are. Some of the effects we came up with are weight, outside force, clothing, material of slide, slope, length, etc. for our investigation we looked at how the weight affects how fast you will go down the slide. For our experiment we filled a film container with different materials to change the weight. We then slid the film container down a “slide” that was 2 meters long. Through our experiment we learned that weight does affect how fast you will go down the slide. Our film containers that weighed the most were filled full of water and sand and they went down the fastest.  A description of what you learned in Thursday's lecture.  During the lecture we learned that a rider’s speed on a slide is affected by the height o...

The big question addressed in the lab, and a description of what you did. In the lab our big question was, how can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous? How can we ensure that a race is exciting? In the lab we put these questions to the test by measuring how we can make races fun with someone who is slower and who is faster. A race is not fun when one child is faster than the other. So we measured how fast it would take a faster person to run and walk 6 meteors and then how fast a slower person could go. With this information we were able to see how much of a head start the slower person would need to make the race close and enjoyable for everyone. When we got with another group we figured out how much slower the other person was to determine what the head start was going to be. The person was about 2 seconds slower than four runners. So we gave the other group a 2 second head start and while our person still won, the race was close and more fun to watch.  A descripti...