Day #283 Consistency in the Scientific Process – Character Development, Week #41

I was trying to think of things that take consistency. I thought about the scientific process and the importance of consistency as you are conducting your experiment. I wanted to come up with a kid friendly science experiment and came up with the idea to try and make a car go on 3 different surfaces: kitchen floor, oriental rug and carpet. I was just going to take one of those little self propelled cars that you pull back on. My husband was convinced that those were not very consistent in the way they drove. He suddenly became very into making sure our process was really accurate, and that’s why he was invited to the party. I was just going to wing it to get the main idea across. He took it to the next level. So, we came up with a little rigging of getting a hanger and stringing a rubber band across. The rubber band had a little knot on the end you could pull back on. He also had a ruler and would pull the rubber band to the same exact spot each time. We talked to the kids about having only one variable and being very consistent with the rest. They wanted to bring in other cars, but we talked about how that wouldn’t keep it consistent. We showed how you had to pull back to the same spot each time.  We talked about using the same tool for measuring. We also did the process on each surface 3 times to get 3 measurements to make sure we were being consistent with our process. 

This was our first run on the kitchen floor. We originally tried the little red car, but it wasn’t rolling consistently, so we switched to the black. It worked well. We stuck with the black for the rest of the experiement. Again, we pulled the rubber band back to the same spot each time and let go. It went 90 inches.

The second attempt was on the oriental rug. We kept everything consistent, but our variable was obviously the rug surface. It went 36 inches.