How to Pick a Science Fair Experiment

Presented is a set of intuitive classroom assignments that lead students
to pick better quality science fair projects, and in the process, teaching
them the "Scientific Process" and how it is something that they already
intuitively know.

Students are often impeded with the notion that "thinking like a scientist"
is so different from the way they normally think that they don't know how
to proceed. The given approach starts students with intuitive activities
with which they are already familiar then shows them how to merely "fine tune"
their thinking rather than viewing science as "speaking a foreign language".

In a nutshell, I propose that choosing a topic for a science fair project
and designing its experiment properly are the equivalent to the intuitive
activities of making a list of “Whenever THIS then THAT” statements and then
choosing the best “bar bet” that can be constructed from the list.

One intuitively makes observations and constructs theories to explain them
whenever a “Whenever THIS then THAT” statement is made. One intuitively
evaluates the quality of a science experiment whenever one evaluates the
quality of a bet. I.E. the same things that make a good bet make good science.
Namely:
* - you think you know something about the world that the other guy
doesn’t know (otherwise he won’t take the bet if he knows it too)
* - you think you understand it well enough to explain it (otherwise it is
not a safe bet)
* - you think you can demonstrate a prediction about it (i.e. the bet itself)
in such a way that the outcome will be clear (otherwise there will be
an argument over who won the bet).
* - you have controlled the conditions of the demonstration (otherwise it
makes the outcome of the bet be affected by things you can’t predict).
* - someone else can perform the bet if need be (otherwise people will think
you’ve rigged the game).

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The Approach
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0) Preview the Scientific Process to students

a) observations about the world are made
b) theories are created that explain those observations
c) predictions are made from those theories
d) experiments to verify the predictions are made
e) the results of the experiments either confirm the
predictions and therefore the theory, or they don't,
in which case one goes back to (b) taking into account
the new observations made by this experiment.

0) Preview some factors that make “good science”

*) observations are new
*) observations are surprising
*) theories make predictions that can be tested
*) experiments produce results that are conclusive
*) experiments are repeatable by others

1) Observations and Theories

[Use the intuition students exhibit, to both make observations
and generate theories to explain them, whenever they use
sentences like "Whenever THIS then THAT".]

(a) Assignment 1: make a list of things you know/believe about the world

“Everyone make a list of things that they have noticed (or been told
or read) about the world.
(At least 5 things and extra credit for each extra item up to 20 items).
The items in the list should all be in one of the following forms:
* - Whenever THIS happens (or not),
then THAT seems to always happen (or not).
* - Whenever THIS situation exists (or not),
then THAT seems to always happen (or not).

Examples of form:
* - I've noticed that whenever I let go of something I'm holding,
it seems to always fall to the ground.
* - I've noticed that whenever I drop a rock in water,
it never floats.
* - I've noticed that whenever people are with their friends,
they are louder than when they are alone or with strangers.
* - I've been told that whenever plants get too much water,
they die.”

(b) follow up discussion to Assignment 1: review how students made both
observations *and* theories to explain them.
* - By putting beliefs (whether inspired by direct observation or
having been informed by others) into the form "when this then that",
it filtered out simple observations that had no theory attached.
E.G. "I noticed that the sky is usually blue" is an observation, but
there is no theory to explain it. In order to say "if A then B",
one had to already have enough of an idea about cause and effect to
make the statement, whether the statement itself was correct or not.
But people/students makes statements like this all the time and
therefore are producing theories whether they realized it or not.

2) Experiment Selection and Design

[Use the intuition students exhibit, to choose interesting science
experiments and to design them to produce a clear result, whenever
they use sentences like "I'll bet you!".]

(a) Assignment 2: make bets out of the theories

Part 1: Everyone take their list of observations, and for each one, make
a bet out of it.
Examples:
* - I'll bet you that if I let go of this ball,
it will fall to the floor.
* - I'll bet you that if I throw this rock in the water,
it won't float.
* - I'll bet you that if we measure the noise level of 3 friends
eating together in the lunchroom it will be louder than if we
measure 3 people eating together that don't know each other.
* - I'll bet you that if I give this houseplant way more water
than the gardening book says it should get, it will die.

Part 2: Take your list of bets and rate each one for the factors below.
Add these factors together to get the quality score for each bet.
For safety, add the practicality factor 3 times instead of once.
The higher the score, the better the quality.
* - How non-obvious is this? (i.e. will anyone take this bet?)
Rank from 1 to 10 where 10 is "nobody knows this but me"
and 1 is "everyone on the planet knows this"
* - How well do you understand your theory (i.e. how sure of
the bet are you?). Rank from 1 to 10 where 10 means "I'm
sure I'll win the bet" and 1 means "I'm just guessing
what will happen."
* - How practical is it? (i.e. is there a way to actually
make a bet out of this?) Rank from 1 to 10 where 10 means
"this is easy to perform" and 1 means "this will take
a UN resolution to actually do."
* - How obvious will the outcome be? (i.e. how obvious will
it be who won the bet?) Rank from 1 to 10 where 10 means
"obvious result" and 1 means "we'll be in an argument
all day over who won, was it fair, is it a do-over, etc."

Part 3: Make any changes you can to the description/design of each
bet to improve its quality score before settling on the final
quality score for each bet. Take the top 3 bets and rank
each for the following factors:
* - How well can I control things that might affect the result?
(i.e. will I lose the bet because of something I can't
predict or control?). Rank from 1 to 10 where 10 means
"nothing should foul up the works if I specify when/where/
how/etc" and 1 means "every time the air conditioner
comes on it blows down my house of cards".
What conditions can be added that will make it more of a
sure bet? After adding them, make a final rank for this
factor.
* - How well can I describe the procedure? (i.e. how easy will
it be for a 3rd party to perform the bet?) Rank from 1 to
10 where 10 means "even a trained monkey could do this
correctly" and 1 means "I'm the only one who can ever
make this work".
How can the procedure and description be simplified and
improved such that others can get the same results every
time? After making the improvements, make a final rank for
this factor.

Part 4: Add the factors from part 3 to those from part 2 for the top
3 bets and pick the one with the highest quality score as your
choice for an experiment.

The GanttMagic webapp works separately from reXume now....

The multiple web app WAR files previously published for GanttMagic have been consolidated into a single GanttMagic.war which can be deployed on any web container and has been tested with Tomcat 4.1 (J2EE 1.3) and JRun3.0 (J2EE 1.2). For older J2EE web containers running on JDK 1.3, you may need
to install the following library jar file into the shared library area (e.g. for JRun3.0 it is at [jrun_install]/lib/ext/ ).

Also with this release, this GanttMagic webapp may be deployed and used separately from the new release of the reXume webapp. Previously the two had to be deployed within a single webapp to work properly.

This code is running and available online at http://rexume.dyndns.org/GanttMagic/
where is runs on my old Pentium II system with RedHat6.x and JRun3 (so don't expect lightning speed).
The demo installation is still found at this test page.

The reXume webapp works separately from GanttMagic now....

The multiple web app WAR files previously published for reXume have been consolidated into a single reXume.war which can be deployed on any web container and has been tested with Tomcat 4.1 (J2EE 1.3) and JRun3.0 (J2EE 1.2).

Also with this release, this reXume webapp may be deployed and used separately from the new release of the GanttMagic webapp. Previously the two had to be deployed within a single webapp to work properly.

This code is running and available online at http://polyglotinc.dyndns.org/reXume/ where is runs on my old Pentium II system with RedHat6.x and JRun3 (so don't expect lightning speed).
The demo installation is found at this interactive resume page.

Things I learned today while fighting the MSBlaster worm...

(1) what looks like normal problems with Charter cable modem
service being flaky can actually be caused by MSBLASTER.

(1.5) It is hard to diagnose anything over Charter these days
because they have disabled all ICMP (i.e. ping/traceroute)
messages in a vain attempt to fight viruses. Earthlink
happily does not block ICMP so you can dial out to Mindspring
to ping Charter boxes.

(2) I found that one of my Win2K systems was infected by seeing
"msblast.exe" in the Task Manager display.

(3) searching Yahoo I found a good page about the blaster worm
which told me how to fix it and had a link to the patch
to prevent getting it in the future.

(4) while I normally am immune to these problems because of
my firewall, it didnt take long for the worm to find and
infect me while I was dialed into Mindspring/Earthlink
which puts my computer directly on the Internet (only the
cable modem goes thru the router/firewall [Netgear RP614]).

(4.5) I see that when I dial directly to the net via Earthlink,
I am constantly SMURF attacked which doesn't happen when
behind the firewall when connecting via the cable modem.

(4.6) Even though the Netgear router lets you set up a static
IP address but still set it to "ask for DNS server addresses",
it doesnt work (at least with Charter) which makes sense
since DHCP which gives you a dynamic IP address, also gives
you the DNS addresses and if you dont ask for one, you wont
get the other either.

(5) searching my Linux box's various logs to see what all that
network activity was about, I saw in the Apache logs (which
I never look at) that there were lots of failed requests
via the web for "default.ida" which is the symptom of other boxes
with the Code Red virus trying to attack me. Good little
discussion of it here.

(6) Just because you see the Norton AntiVirus running its auto-
update feature every day or so to update its virus definitions,
that doesn't mean it is scanning for viruses too. That is
scheduled separately (and it hadn't scanned my system since
the last time I did it manually about 8 months ago.)

Announcing GanttMagic from PolyGlot, Inc....

I've finally gotten around to making my Gantt chart software available to others as either a product or an open-source-project (haven't decided which yet).

As with the reXume project (which uses GanttMagic to produce the "experience charts"), there is lots of web-accessible documentation to still to produce and the code published today is a first baby step.

GanttMagic produces a gantt chart (often misspelled as "gannt") given data in the GanttMagic XML format. (Here is the small example data file that the test program mentioned below uses.)
It currently can produce the chart image in SVG, JPG, and PNG formats.
It is implemented in Java using the Apache Batik SVG library.

I have broken out and cleaned up my GanttMagic code and packaged it into a JavaBean that includes all of the basic functionality, a standalone application to use the bean via a command line, and a J2EE web application to make the functionality available from any JSP/Servlet engine.

I have produced the following three varieties of WAR file for loading into the appropriate J2EE servers. [Tested on Tomcat and JRun]
1) GanttMagic3.war - tested on Tomcat3.3 and JRun3.0 (both J2EE 1.2 compliant)
2) GanttMagic40.war - tested on Tomcat4.0 (J2EE 1.3 compliant)
3) GanttMagic41.war - tested on Tomcat4.1 (J2EE 1.3 compliant)

This code is running and available online at http://rexume.dyndns.org/GanttMagic/
where is runs on my old Pentium II system with RedHat6.x and JRun3 (so don't expect lightning speed).

I'll add documentation soon, but for now, try using the test page to experiment with. Choose which type of image you want (SVG,JPG,PNG) and hit the "show me" button. The other controls are not interesting for now. JPG is the most universal format. To see the SVG, you'll need either a standalone viewer or a browser plugin. I've heard new IE browsers may already have an SVG plugin installed. Otherwise follow the links to install an SVG viewer browser plug-in to see the raw SVG rendered. Without an SVG viewer, you can see the raw SVG source which is just an XML text file.