Experimental Design B/C

[siciscio]

Does anyone know any good biology tests for ED?

Like Experimental Design Events. I believe one of the older National Events wanted you to prove that yeast was alive. I forget if it was Division B or C....
Edit: it was Minnesota Experimental as well. http://scioly.org/w/images/0/0d/MN_Exp_design_c_div.pdf
Hope that helps

[butter side up]

Does anyone know any good biology tests for ED?

I don't know if it counts, but the closest I remember is an experiment relating the speed at which a mealworm crawled to the surface it was crawling across. According to my coach, there have been experiments in the past which required the use of the participants as a part of the experiment (relating height to distance able to jump, or something) but we haven't seen many of those recently in our area. I haven't seen any of what I would call a "good" biology experiment, but biology experiments are notoriously full of uncontrollable variables, and also require a long time to be properly run. There is also an inherent difficulty in relying on live organisms, or anything that once was part of a live organism, as animals/ plants may die, organic matter may decompose, and there are ridiculous numbers of variables that cannot be controlled in an experiment that is assumed to be conducted in five to twenty minutes.
I suppose experiments that I have seen that would be easily adaptable for this kind of fast-paced setting would be one that is more biochemical in nature, like those one would see in Food Science, like testing for the presence of lipids, sugars, etc. in foods. Alternatively, one could be given a brief explanation of a biological experiment that may take a longer time, such as pH of soil on plants, and would have to write a problem statement and hypothesis before they could view the results, which would remove the long-term problems with biological experiments, but would also remove the actual experimental design portion of the event.
So, while the rules do specify that an experiment may be biological in nature, you are much more likely to see physics, and occasionally chemistry.

[fozendog]

I agree. I is hard for supervisors to do biology experiments because many are not trained in that field of science and they have to be able to have all the necessary supplies for more than one time cycle during the tournament. I do see physics experiments a lot, but I have been seeing some more chemistry lately. My state tournament had us dissolve alka-seltzer in water.