Week 2

 This week in lab we started by discussing how to keep students engaged during science. The three pillars that go into engaging science instruction we discussed, were the science programs, teaching style and classroom management. The classroom management aspect is very important and we should always remember to stay positive, provide appropriate pacing, clear instruction and mix in variety to your science instruction.

The next two tasks that we completed in lab was a formative assessment that was completed individually regarding how we interpret a graph. This would be a good strategy to implement in an Elementary classroom to see where students are at. The individual nature requires students to challenge themselves and rely on their own understanding. Next, we discussed as a table what materials we would remove or potentially add to our motion tub. We chose to design our motion tub based on a 5th grade science classroom. We decided to remove a couple items like bubbles and the balloon because we thought they may be too distracting. 

Lastly, we tackled our big question for the week. How can we support play that is exciting but not dangerous? This week, we focused specifically on slides. We set out to design a fair test to support a claim about how a variable affects the speed of the rider. We chose to test how the slope of the slide affects the speed of the rider. We hypothesized that the steeper the slide, the faster the rider would go. We found this claim to be true after we conducted our experiment.  For our experiment we used two wood boards that were the same length, but different slopes. The "riders" of the slide for this experiment were tennis balls. We found that the tennis ball on the steeper board covered the distance of the board in a faster time than the less steep board by about .15 seconds.