Tyler's Science Methods Blog

  1: Lab: How the phases of the moon occur: the Moon rotates the Earth and takes about a month to go all the way around, as it goes around each night we see it at a different point in its rotation, and because it is at a different point around the sun, the shadow that the Earth casts on it covers up a little more or less of the moon, resulting in different shaped cutouts or phases that we can see. 2. Seasons: Seasons are caused by the Earth rotating around the sun and spinning on its axis at an angle. The angle of the Earth’s rotation causes either the north or south half of the planet to be closer to the Earth. Whichever half happens to be tilted towards the sun is the season in the Summer, and as it rotates along the angle Fall and Spring are created, and then as it is at it is tilted away from the Sun winter is created. 3: A lunar eclipse is caused when the Moon rotates around the Earth and lines up directly with the Sun where the Sun is in front of it and the moon is invisibl...

  Lab : In Lab this week we began by discussing our homework from last week. We talked about pieces that were meaningful to us and the core ideas that our list reveals about the article. Then we talked about why we think that we need to push someone on a swing to keep them going, and why they won’t stay moving forever. We brought this into a pendulum situation and played with the friction slider, I was able to see that the pendulum slowed down faster when there was more air friction. This showed me that it was friction in the air that causes pendulums to eventually come to a stop. We then talked about this from an energy lens, and I learned that the pendulum collides with air particles, so the air friction is actually the pendulum transferring kinetic energy into the air particles. Then we moved to talking about our unit as a whole. Particularly we talked about what lenses we can use to talk about different settings and supporting play for them that is exciting, while remaining saf...

  Discussion: This week in discussion we talked about our school of the wild lesson plans, and then moved onto our big discussion of Pendulums. We made a hypothesis about whether the size of the pendulum would affect how fast it spun. I predicted that it would not, and I was correct. We then made a different experiment, and we decided to change the length of the string in the experiment. We predicted that a shorter string length would make it swing faster and we were correct in our prediction. Lecture: This week in lecture we continued our discussion of pendulums, beginning by drawing the forces acting on a swing. We talked about these different forces, and mentioned how ropes pull in the direction they are facing, as well as against gravity. We then began to talk about energy and describing it. We mentioned it being manifested as kinetic energy and potential energy in a pendulum. If something is moving, it has kinetic energy, and it is not moving it has potential energy ener...

  Lab:               There was no lab this week. Lecture: In lecture today we continued to talk about friction. We went over our friction discussion from last week and brought it into our new discussion about gravity. We talked about friction in relation to air resistance and how some objects fall at different rates because of it. Most objects, however, fall at the same rate, because they cut through the air particles rather than being able to catch them. We continued this point and watched a video of a bowling ball and feathers falling with and without air resistance. We talked about how feathers generate a lot more frictional force because their surface area and weight catches more air particles and generates more friction. Textbook Reading:           From the textbook I learned that a force is really, “A push or pull upon an object resulting from the object’s i...

Big Question: In discussion we continued to talk about the big question of “How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous?” We first worked in a group to use our tools from last week and create a list of items to use for a chosen grade to use to learn motion. We chose grade 5 and created our list. Then, we worked in groups to create a test for finding the effects on speed caused by the height and slope of the slide. We found that the higher the slope or steepness of the ramp, the faster the ball moved.   Thursday’s Lecture: In lecture we began by talking about why the speed of a tall slide is higher than that of a shorter slide, we concluded that the more time on the higher slide causes more speed to be gained resulting in a higher speed gained. We then drew what we thought this would look like on a graph and discussed what it would actually look like. We then discussed force and why we speed up as we continue falling. We talked about how forces can cancel, lik...