Experimental Design and Mini Poster Instructions

Lower Secondary M. Waterman & E. Stanley NIE 2014

Your group will be designing, conducting and reporting an experiment related to the Shine the Lights case. This experiment will involve generating a question and collecting data from the Circuit Construction Kit simulation at https://phet.colorado.edu/en/simulation/circuit- construction-kit-ac .

You will have 45 minutes to design and conduct the experiment and another 30 minutes or so to prepare a small, one-sheet, mini poster to report on your experiment. You will be using marking pens and poster paper. These posters are not meant to be professionally done, so they will be rough. However, they are meant to communicate your findings.

Experiment: Work in groups of 3 or 4 Discuss your questions from the Shine the Lights case and sharpen your focus to a testable question. Design an experiment with the simulation that you use to explore the question your group agrees upon.

1a. What question are you addressing?

1b. Write down the hypothesis you are testing. Use the If/If/then format (If water us required for growth and if I water my plants more, then they will grow more).

2. What are you varying? Define this independent variable.

3. What are you going to keep constant?

LS-03A Lower Secondary M. Waterman & E. Stanley NIE 2014

4. What outcome(s) are you going to measure? Define how you are going to measure the outcome(s). The outcomes are the dependent variable.

5. Prepare a table to collect your data here.

6. Inferences: What can you conclude about your hypothesis?

LS-03A Lower Secondary M. Waterman & E. Stanley NIE 2014

Mini Poster

Use a single sheet of newsprint, provided on the supply table. You may use it in portrait or in landscape mode. You may illustrate your poster to enhance the reader’s understanding and to better communicate your findings.

You poster needs to include the following:

1. The title of your experiment 2. The experimenters’ names 3. The hypothesis being tested 4. A description of how the hypothesis was tested 5. The data 6. Inferences drawn from the data

You will have about 30 minutes to prepare the poster.

We will be doing a round robin poster session for 20 minutes. During that time, each group needs to visit three posters. One person needs to be at your poster to answer questions and we will help you rotate .

LS-03A