Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hi there,

My partner and I want to measure the speed of light using a microwave and chocolate chips for our Grade 9 Science Fair project, but our teacher says we need an independent variable. What would that be in this experiment? Help!

Jamie

Hi,

It sounds like your cool (or should I say hot) experiment is closely related to this Science Buddies writeup:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... g&from=TSW

To figure out your question look at this section of the Science Buddies Project Guide:
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... bles.shtml

If you still can’t answer your question, post back and we will try to give you a little more explicit help - but try to answer it yourself first.

Best wishes.

Barrett Tomlinson

Thanks for the info. We did look at those pages, but couldn't really figure out what could be the independent variable. We had hoped to find microwaves with different frequencies but they are all the same 2450 Mhz.

The only two variables we could think of were the frequency of the microwave and the distance between the hot spots and we can't really control either of those...

Hi,

Sounds like you identified two variables in your experiment, frequency and wavelength. By definition you set the value of the independent variable and observe the dependent variable (see the link on variables, #2 in my first post). Since you observe or measure the wavelength in the experiment, that means the independent variable must be …

This is a quite fundamental point in your science fair project, so I suggest you really think carefully about the topic of variables ( and ask your teacher for clarification if this subject is still not clear to you).

Good luck and have fun with the project!

Barrett Tomlinson