Solve it Your Way — Some results from other classes

Polar Bear, St. Louis Zoo
Creative Commons License Photo Credit: Tim Hamilton via Compfight

Check out the Solve it Your Way website. The first two links have been uploaded, one from Ohio and one from Arizona. Check out how they answered this question.

Are you inspired to try? If so, give it a whirl and report back to me. I’ll post your results on line through this blog and we can link to that on Franki’s website.

Here’s a format for putting the information together. I can help with this. Just let me know.

Part 1: Materials Used

List the materials you used — including balls and ramp (if you used one…). Photos are great to go along with the list.

Part 2: Hypothesis (that’s a scientific prediction with a reason.)

Tell what you think is going to happen and why. It can be something like this: I think the soccer ball will roll farthest because it is the heaviest.

Part 3: Procedure

Tell what you did in the order your did it. First I …; Next I …; etc. Photos or video of you doing that are really great to have.

Part 4: Results

Tell what you found out. Example: The boce ball rolled the farthest (2.3 meters). The soccer ball rolled 1.9 meters…

Make a table that shows the ball and the distance traveled.

Part 5: Discussion

Talk about why you might have gotten the results you did. You might even tell what experiment this made you want to do to find out more about rolling balls. Here’s a real example from when I talked with Emmit about this yesterday from his experiment: I was surprised that the foam ball rolled the farthest because it wasn’t very heavy. I think the wind pushed it along. If I did the experiment again, I’d try it on a day that wasn’t windy to see if the results were different.

Published by

Steve Peterson

I teach fifth grade in Iowa.

4 thoughts on “Solve it Your Way — Some results from other classes”

  1. Thanks for the format. we will get them together and post their results.

    i am glad emmit wasn’t too shy to give u an answer.

    1. Yes. Me, too! It was fun to talk with him about the experiment. Did you get a chance to see how those classrooms did their experiments? I was going to show the video to 4P this morning (and write a comment of two from them, too) but we ran out of time. Maybe later.

    1. Excellent! I’m excited to see how it went. Was it fun? Do you think the guys have a better sense of how to design an experiment??

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