Physical science design your own experiment idea!!!!

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hihowareya
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Joined: Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:23 am
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Physical science design your own experiment idea!!!!

Post by hihowareya »

I really need help with my one of the assignment that my teacher has given to me. The topic is Design your own experiment about physical science forces and motion. I have been doing many researches about this, and one of the thing that i could do is the bounciness of the ball and how far will it travel depends on the bounciness. So, i decided to take 3 different type of balls and test it out, but he said that, it is not testing something when you are doing that, that is measuring, not testing. So, i'm really confused about what to do for this design your own experiment, I really need help and i need it fast. Please help me!!!
norman40
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Re: Physical science design your own experiment idea!!!!

Post by norman40 »

Hello hihowareya,

In your proposed experiment, the independent variable is the type of ball. The dependent variable is how high the ball bounces. The type of ball could have an effect on bounce height but the three balls may differ in several ways (mass, diameter, materials, etc). If so your results wouldn't give you any indication as to which of the differences in the balls affected the bounce height.

A better experiment would be one in which only one variable is changed. For example, you could change the air pressure in a basketball and measure the bounce height for each pressure. In this case the air pressure is the independent variable. And the results of this experiment would indicate the effect of air pressure on the bounce height of the basketball. There is a Science Buddies project for this experiment. You may want to take a look at it to better understand the experimental design:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... #procedure

And Science Buddies has a very good guide on working through science projects. You might want to take a look at the sections on constructing a hypothesis and testing your hypothesis:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ience-fair

I hope this helps. Please ask again if you have more questions.

A. Norman
hihowareya
Posts: 3
Joined: Wed Apr 04, 2018 7:23 am
Occupation: Student

Re: Physical science design your own experiment idea!!!!

Post by hihowareya »

Thanks for the help, I really do. But, what i am trying to say here is that the bounciness of the ball is not approved by my teacher, he said you're not testing anything, you're just measuring something. So what he wants me to do is to create an experiment where i am testing something not just measuring the height or the distance that the ball will travel.
I really appreciate what you have written up there to answer my question, but i still need help with idea asap!!!
cumulonimbus
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Re: Physical science design your own experiment idea!!!!

Post by cumulonimbus »

Hi hihowareya,

I think what your teacher means is that measuring how high the ball bounces is not a valid scientific experiment if there isn't a measurable independent variable that you're changing. If you just use 3 random balls and measure their bounciness, you're not really testing the effect of any variable - pressure, elasticity, temperature, etc. If you actively change one variable and keep the others the same, however, you are conducting an actual experiment that tests the effect of the independent variable on the dependent variable. I hope this clears things up!

Elena
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