Experimental Design

This week I tried a new activity with all my classes.  I called it Experimental Design.  I had my classes come in and grab a piece of paper, and make a paper airplane and write their name on the plane for retrieval purposes.  Simple enough ... or so it would seem.  About half of every class had never made a paper airplane.  What?

So once the students made their airplanes (accompanied by lots of complaining), they all stood along a line across the front of the room. and I asked:

• What could we measure with the airplanes?

The student brainstormed lots of answers and then I asked:

• Which of these would be the easiest for us to measure today?

 We decided that distance would be the easiest to measure (it was the first week of school after all).  And they threw their planes.  Then once the laughter subsided, they picked up the planes and returned to their desks.

Then I directed them to make a change to their plane.  They could make a new fold, or add tape, staples or a paper clip.  When they were finished they went back to the line at the front.  Then they had to make a hypothesis (next year they have to do this at their desk on paper, but I liked the class discussion feel, just not the recap after).  the hypothesis had to be an "if...then..." statement.  Then we threw them again, and returned to their desks.  There were several follow up questions:

• What did we change?
• What did we measure?
• What things stayed the same?
• What did we compare our results to? (just added this one now)

These questions allowed us to talk about independent variables, dependent variables, constants and controls.  Some students had different constants than one another depending on if they threw the airplane the same way or not.  

• What would be the best measure of success?  (farthest one time flight or average)
• What do we still need? (more trials)

And i let them throw for the remainder of the class, and even had some students conducting airplane tutorials.  It was not all fun and games, the students did have a writing assignment about experimental design due at the end of class.  Another teacher used this and had them record the distance of each flight trial, take averages and even graphing.  

I learned about this activity from Amy at my AP training, and I am loving it!  I plan on using it as long as I can.