Lego shake table - graphing and variables

[Octotrouble]

I am helping my kindergartener with the Lego shake table experiment, for his science fair project. He’s planning to build a few different tower heights and we will decide on several displacement values which we will repeat for each tower. I had a couple of questions:

1. How would you display the data in a fun way? Is there a certain type of graph that fits well with these variables and results?

2. Should the base design/footprint of the tower be the same for each height? If they are different, how would you incorporate this into data interpretation and results, given that it is an additional variable?

Thank you! This is his first science fair and he loves Lego, so I am excited to guide him

[Administrator note: Project directions: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... lest-tower]

[audreyln]

Hi,

This sounds like a fun project!

1. The data you are collecting is in Table 1 (height of tower and if it fell or not). A fun way to display this data might be to make a little cutout lego tower for each test and place them in two columns - one for no fall and one for fall. The little cutouts would vary in size relative to the tower. I'm sure there are many other ways to do this so this is just one Kindergarten appropriate suggestion.

2. Your statement that base design/footprint is another variable is correct so this should be held constant if you are varying the height of the tower. If desired, you could run a second experiment where the height of the tower is held constant, and the base design/footprint is changed to find the most stable base.

Hope this helps! Good luck.

Audrey

[Octotrouble]

Hi, thank you for your reply! This is a great idea. In addition to making a fun table, are there any visual graphs/charts that would fit the results well? I was thinking a bar graph, to show the displacement value at which each tower fell (tower height on x axis, displacement in cm on y axis). Would love to hear your thoughts.

[audreyln]

This would also be a good option for a chart and very advanced for a kindergartener! I would suggest a scatter plot with points, rather than a bar chart for this application.