Research and Its Applications

1. Research and Its Applications The Scientific Method

2. What is Research? • Research is the investigation of some topic with the hopes of learning facts about the topic and sometimes discovering new things about it. • Each field has its own techniques and methods for conducting research: • In Social Studies people perform research by reading books or looking at historical artifacts for clues • In Mathematics people may use the math they do know to try and gather more information about things they don’t • In Zoology(the study of animals) people may observe a population of animals in order to learn something about them. • In the Sciences people usually design some sort of experiment using the Scientific Method to learn more about something

3. What is the Scientific Method? • The scientific method is a systematic approach to conducting research or answering a question. • The Scientific Method is a multi step process that has the following parts: • Problem/Question identification • Do/make background research or observations • Formulate a Hypothesis • Perform an experiment • Collect and Analyze data • Form a conclusion • Tell your results to other people

4. Identifying a Problem/Question • Your problem or question statement is a concise description of the thing you are trying to better understand through your research. • It is the How, What, When, Who, Which, Why, or Wherefor your project. • For example if we wanted to learn more about the electrical properties of some common household items we might ask: • Which material is the best insulator? • There are also questions and topics which may be badresearch questions for applying the scientific method.

5. Doing Background Research • Before you start doing any sort of experiments you should do some research about the topic your question is about. • Looking up information ahead of time can save you time and even keep you safe. • Having a basic understanding of the topic can help you interpret results which may otherwise look weird or confusing. • What sorts of resources can/should you use? • Your local libraries and librarians • The internet(Google, Wikipedia, Online encyclopedias, Articles) • What sorts of resources should you be careful with? • Websites without a listed author, date of publication, citations… • Social media as well as magazine and newspaper articles • Really old and potentially out of date sources(i.e. a book on robotics from the 1950’s)

6. Formulate a Hypothesis • What is a Hypothesis? • A hypothesis is a statement about what you think may or may not happen during your experiment. • An educated guess about the results before you actually collect them • Often in “If ______, Then _____ will happen.” form • Why do we have a hypothesis? • Depending on your research question there may be dozens of different things that can affect it. • For example, If your research question is about “when is the best time to plant soybeans?” you could be looking at everything from what time of day to what time of year. • Forming out hypothesis can help us single out a particular aspect that we want to test and learn about

7. Perform an Experiment • Now that we have a hypothesis to test we need to design and perform an experiment to test it. • Here are a few tips you should keep in mind when designing your own experiment: • Keep it simple. You shouldn’t need access to a world class lab to learn about the best time to plant soybeans. • Only change one thing at a time. Each experiment should only have one set of independent and dependent variables. • Always have a control group. You can’t know whether something worked without having a group that you didn’t change. • If possible repeat your experiment, sometimes weird things can happen. • Try to explain your experiment to other people. If they can’t figure out why your experiment should work there may be something wrong about it.

8. Collect and Analyze Data • Now that we have performed an experiment we need to look at the data we collected and determine the answer to the question. • You may need to go back and redo or redesign your experiment, not every experiment works out the first time. • Whenever possible include any tables, graphs or photographs representing your data. • Programs such as Microsoft Excel or Open Office Calc can be a big help in visualizing your data with various plots. • Whenever applicable be sure to compare your results with any existing theories to see if it makes sense. You shouldn’t have any results that violate the basic laws of physics for example.

9. Form Your Conclusion • Now that you’ve done your experiment or experiments its time to try and use all of the data you’ve collected to answer your research question. • Your Conclusion should answer your research question as well as confirm or reject your hypothesis by using the data you’ve collected • Its alright for your hypothesis to be rejected. You learn just as much from a rejected hypothesis as from a confirmed hypothesis. Science experiments aren’t about trying to be the best at guessing the results ahead of time. • Try to think of other additional work you could’ve done in order to get better results or identify areas where you might’ve made mistakes in your experiment design.

10. Communicate the Results • You may have produced really cool results or learned quite a lot about the topic your research question was about, but if you can’t communicate those results to other people it doesn’t count for much. • Most of the famous people with laws named after them were the ones who wrote them down the clearest, not the ones who discovered them. • What forms can this take? • Posters Presentations(real scientists do these too, check out this one) • An oral presentation w/ a PowerPoint • A written report

11. Optional Activity #1 The Scientific Method In Action

12. The Science of Coke and Mentos • There is no better way to learn about the scientific process than to go out and do actual science. • You’ve all probably at least heard of the Coke and Mentos myth and may have even seen videos of people like the Myth Busters testing it out. • Even if you haven’t check out this video and it’ll all make a little more sense. • There are probably a number of things we can ask about this for a research question, but for us practicing the scientific method we’ll ask as out question: “Does more Mentos make the jet shoot out higher”