In this video we will discuss how to think about and test your experiment.
We will look at equipment and we will talk about why testing your experiment is important.
When you think about the equipment consider your research question.
The research question in my example IA is how does the height of the water in a glass affect
the frequency of the sound? Now based on your research question think about what you will do
in your experiment and make a list of the equipment that you will need. In my experiment I will
fill a glass with water so I need a glass, water and measuring tape. I will hit the side of the
glass with a metal spoon to create the sound wave and I need to find a way to measure the
frequency of the emitted sound. After doing some research and considering different options
I decided to use the Google Science Journal app. Before you go any further please make sure that
you have access to all equipment. It would be a waste of time and energy to write parts of your IA
and then find out that your experiment is not viable. You might have to talk to your physics
teacher or lab technician at your school to see if you have access to all the equipment that you need.
Once you confirmed that you have access to all equipment it's time to test your experiment.
This might seem like extra work now but it is a crucial step. If you find out that your
experiment does not work or does not provide you with high quality data you can still change it
before writing parts of your IA. Testing your experiment at this point will save you time
and energy in the long run. You will need to set up your equipment and collect some data.
It's the best to carry out tests at the highest and lowest values of the independent variable.
In my experiment I used a glass with a height of 13 centimeters. So my highest independent
variable value is 12 centimeters and the lowest value is when the glass is empty so 0 centimeters.
I recorded the frequency of the emitted sound wave for a water level of 12 centimeters a few
times and got these values. For an empty glass I got these values. So through testing my experiment
I confirmed that it is easy to change the independent variable, easy to measure the
dependent variable and that the dependent variable gives a good range of data. If for
example at 0 centimeters I would have gotten values close to 710 hertz my experiment would
probably not give me a good range of data and I might need to rethink what I want to do.
And the final plea please please test your experiment because I have seen several students
in the past waste a lot of time later in their IA process because they did not make sure that
their experiment works properly. This completes step one action three now you know how to think
about and test your experiment. In the next video we will discuss how to write your introduction.