Experimental Design B/C

[RBears6]

FOURTH IN THE NATION YES!!!!!!!!!

Nice job! I thought the topic of the experiment was a little weird but it was nationals and you can expect anything.

[mnstrviola]

What was the experiment topic?

[RBears6]

What was the experiment topic?

It was that you had to find the acidity of drinks commonly found in schools and find which one was the worst for your teeth. We predicted sprite but it was actually lemonade.

[Phenylethylamine]

What was the experiment topic?

It was that you had to find the acidity of drinks commonly found in schools and find which one was the worst for your teeth. We predicted sprite but it was actually lemonade.

C Division was something about the sense of touch, given toothpicks and Q-tips. WM did number of toothpicks (as proxy for surface area) vs. pain (on a self-reported 0 to 10 scale). I don't like the subjectivity associated with pain as a variable, but that's nothing compared to what the B Division one was.

I know Gelinas was second-tiered for doing concentration of one liquid (rather than using multiple liquids) vs. pH, because "Sprite vs. lemonade" is qualitative rather than quantitative (which is just bad experimental form). I don't blame them, and I think it's pretty ridiculous that the experiment apparently required them to have a qualitative IV.

These qualitative variables in general are driving me crazy. It's generally terrible experimental procedure, and to make that a requirement of the event is teaching kids bad scientific practices. Yeah, sure, you can compare the pH of Sprite and lemonade, but how do you establish a trend? It sounds to me like anyone who did an actually valid, quantitative IV experiment would have been second-tiered, because they wanted to see this ridiculous apples-to-oranges comparison.

[XJcwolfyX]

That lady gave us the rubric . . . I thought that would kill our score.

[butter side up]

That lady gave us the rubric . . . I thought that would kill our score.

They gave you the rubric?!
That's really weird. I've never seen anyone give out the rubric, and only sometimes are we even given the section headings. I would have expected that at nationals they wouldn't have given out the rubric, especially seeing as how well one covers all the subpoints on the rubric is what separates the places... and a single point can make a huge difference in how one places at competition.

[XJcwolfyX]

I imagine that the top 20 had to have gotten perfect scores.

[zapofdoom34]

I know Gelinas was second-tiered for doing concentration of one liquid (rather than using multiple liquids) vs. pH, because "Sprite vs. lemonade" is qualitative rather than quantitative (which is just bad experimental form).

If Gelinas got second-tiered, then we definitely did too. We poured lemonade into water and measured the change in pH because we thought that it would be a better experiment. In the end, we got 57th place.

What I'm wondering is how teams that compared the drinks wrote their trends and rationales.

[XJcwolfyX]

We wrote that lemonade was the mos acidic, sprite an apple juice were equally as acidic as each other but not as acidic as lemonade, and water was the least acidic.

[Phenylethylamine]

We wrote that lemonade was the mos acidic, sprite an apple juice were equally as acidic as each other but not as acidic as lemonade, and water was the least acidic.

And how did you graph that? That's the problem: "lemonade - sprite - apple juice - water" is not a quantitative axis.

Argh, this makes me angry. I think out of all my posts on this site, the ones in this thread (and previous years' Experimental threads) are the angriest, because... gah, this event is so often poorly designed and/or poorly run (not to mention the inherent problems with the whole "design, execute and write up an experiment in under an hour" paradigm).