Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello,

I recently read a post by someone with inquired about snails and their speed. I am working with Kindergarten age students. We have already studies the anatomy of a snail, adaptations, and functions of those adaptations. We spoke about mallusk members and gastropods. Now we are engineering ways to connect paperclips to the snail without harming it. We want to find out how many paperclips a snail can drag/pull? How much weight can a snail carry? We are using the engineering design process to do this.

The next experiment is to find out how fast a snail can go in one minute? We have already raced the snails. This is where the post I saw comes in. I thought someone had a lesson or guide to follow for my kindergarteners to do. Please help with this as I would like ideas where to begin or how we should graph the data.

Hi,

I'm not entirely sure what sort of resource you're looking for. Are you trying to find an additional activity to do with your students? Or perhaps looking for advice on how to analyze or graph your snail race data?

If you're just looking for that previous post, I think this is probably it.

I found this easy-to-use site for graphing simple data if you'd like to try that with the kids. This site is a bit more advanced and has more options. If you'd like to just do the graphing yourself, Microsoft Excel is probably the most common program. This Science Buddies page gives some broad information about graphing results and has an example Excel spreadsheet + graph.

Let me know if you're looking for something else and we'll try to help you!
Megan