Experimental Design B/C

[Phenylethylamine]

Wow. Before every tournament, our team has said, "If possible, we're going with a ramp." Pretty much the easiest experiment ever. I've heard some people do completely absurd stuff, though. "Hey, let's get over to a window and see if we can burn this disc using the sun's rays!" or something along those lines.

In a word: KISS.

That is, Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Best Experimental Design advice I can give. The problem statement is not where you show off. The conclusion and statistics are where you show off (although under C Division rules, there's not much room to show off on the statistics, because basically anything you could give them, you have to give them lol). If your experiment is simple, there's considerably less chance it could go wrong. If your experiment fails, you can still do a full-credit write-up, but it requires much, much more effort.

[Avis_de-Incendia]

A more positive acronym would be "Keep It Simple for Success," but I would like to avoid the collective eyeroll.

Anyway, would the proctors take off for an overly simple experiment?

[zyzzyva980]

At my 6th grade science fair I missed out on a point because I threw it together at the last minute and it was not "academically challenging" (still got 74/77) but I don't really think there's anywhere on the Experimental Design rubric they can take points away.

[Phenylethylamine]

A more positive acronym would be "Keep It Simple for Success," but I would like to avoid the collective eyeroll.

Anyway, would the proctors take off for an overly simple experiment?

No. Given the subjectivity of the grading of this event, a really obnoxious event sup might be inclined to view your write-up in a slightly less positive light, but in any case it's still better to have a simple experiment and a complex (but still clear and concise... I know, I know, it's difficult to have all three) write-up. Don't make it too hard for yourself.

Either acronym works Yours is more positive, this is true.

[Avis_de-Incendia]

Couple Questions:

What is a condensed table?

How do you provide example calculations for the quantitative section?

[packer-backer91]

Couple Questions:

What is a condensed table?

How do you provide example calculations for the quantitative section?

the condensed table is a table of data that has all of your important results [ie summery table] often this may be overkill but I like to give avg, range, Standard dev, and sum repeated in their own table again separate from the original table that had all of my data entries. For example calculations I provide the equations I use for each of my statistics. I don’t actually go through and solve them I just think the equations is good enough to get the point for example calculations.

[Phenylethylamine]

Couple Questions:

What is a condensed table?

How do you provide example calculations for the quantitative section?

The condensed table, as packer-backer said, is a table of your statistics (i.e., mean, median, mode if relevant, range), as opposed to the full table, which contains all your data.

The example calculations consist of essentially "showing your work" for the statistics- your mean, median, and range (and in C Division, standard deviation, regression, and correlation coefficient) calculations.

[blue cobra]

Do we need a line graph? I did a practice lab in which we rolled a rolled a ball down a ramp at different heights and measured how far it pushed a paper cup. I represented my data in a bar graph, and the person from the C team that was helping us said that it had to be a line graph, so that I could make a line of best fit. However it is possible that he meant that it would have been to better to make a line graph.

[zyzzyva980]

You don't have to make a line graph to make a line of best fit. Come to think of it, I think we just plotted the points on the graph, no bar or line, and then made the line of best fit. Scatter plot. It seemed to work, we got 1st at a few competitions, though I can't remember that clearly now a few months after competition.

[AustinRHL]

A more positive acronym would be "Keep It Simple for Success," but I would like to avoid the collective eyeroll.

Anyway, would the proctors take off for an overly simple experiment?

No. Given the subjectivity of the grading of this event, a really obnoxious event sup might be inclined to view your write-up in a slightly less positive light, but in any case it's still better to have a simple experiment and a complex (but still clear and concise... I know, I know, it's difficult to have all three) write-up. Don't make it too hard for yourself.

I actually believe that they do. Last year at Nationals, our team was positive that they had done extremely well, and they were all very experienced experimenters and lap writeup writers. So you can imagine that they were stunned to see that they had placed 47th. I don't actually know what experiment they conducted, but I believe that it was the eye-roll-worthy "analysis" of the effect of the mass of a pendulum on its period. Evidently, the grader didn't look kindly on such a blatant abuse of the openness of the event, given that everyone knows that the period of a pendulum is unaffected by changes in its mass. That said, simpler is definitely better, just as long as you don't take it too far.

Conversely, at our regional competition, one of our two teams did exactly that "experiment," having completely missed the restriction printed in big letters on the assignment that it had to concern friction, and yet still placed in first! The supervisors gave us materials that were extremely difficult to use in a friction-based experiment, and perhaps they realized that and took pity on them rather than disqualifying them. I was on the other team, and they put us in second when we looked at air resistance as a function of height (they gave us balloons).