Brainstorming - week 1

For week one, our team was asked to come up with ideas about 150 min labs for middle school students. To start thinking about what might be good experiment for middle school students, we asked ourselves: "what are the main things we care about in this experiment?"

Things we care about:

1. Safety (Are materials/procedure potentially harmful?)

2. Ease of Operation (How efficiently can the procedure be set up, performed, and broken down)

3. Accuracy (Can results be accurate?)

4. Cost efficiency (Cost of overall experiment)

5. Simplicity (Do not want the experiment to be too complicated or simple for the students)

6. Relevancy (Is experiment relevant to the age group of users?)

7. Engagement (Does the experiment appeal to the user?)

8. Material Availability (How easily can materials be obtained?)

9. Time efficiency (Is 150 min enough time allotted to complete the experiment?)

10. Learning outcome (Did the user gain sufficient knowledge by the end of the procedure?)

After discussion, we came up with potential topics:

1. Friction (Sliding car stop)

2. Spring forces (Frequency of oscillating weight)

3. Free fall (Throwing ball of side of a table)

4. Projectile Motion (Catapult)

5. Gravitational Force (Bridges and/or structure)

6. Buoyancy (Measuring different material’s buoyancy capacity)

7. Circuits (Create phone charger)

This was our activity for week one. For week two, we are asked to make analysis and choose which of the following topics would be best to do experiment on.