Makenna Kopf's Science Methods 1 Blog

                                         Week 13 Lab 04/23/2025 This week in lab, I learned quite a bit. We started lab off by looking over our homework from last week which was about how we could modify the activity we did last week in lab to make it suitable for second graders. The modifications I made were to demonstrate the electric conductivity test in front of the class and make it a discussion instead of each group doing it, and for the volume, instead of each group testing it for every object, I would change it to one object for each group. While these are good modifications, I learned this week in lab from reviewing and discussing that in second grade they are looking more for the "observable" properties, and that I could just strike out the volume testing and the electric conductivity testing as a whole. This is something that I did not know I could do, but makes a lot of s...

                                              Week 12 Lab 04/16/25 This week in lab, we started off by going over our homework from last week and we shared three things we learned, two things we found interesting, and a question we still have. My groups question was how do we teach more abstract concepts to students more effectively?  Then, we did an activity where we tested a variety of objects such as a large marble, a small marble, a large paper clip, a small paper clip, a large wooden block, and a small wooden block, a big ball of foil, and a small piece of foil, and many more items. We did a variety of tests so we could find out whether the objects were magnetic, if they could conduct energy, their mass, their volume, and if they sunk or floated in water. I learned a lot from this lab, as I have never really looked much into what every day objects are capable of s...

                                          Week 11 Lab 04/09/2025 This week was our first week with our new instructor for the remainder of the semester, Dr. Jeffery Nordine. We started lab off this week by doing a short get to know you, then we worked on a variety of activities that were very thought provoking.  In today's lab my group started off doing the M&M's in water experiment. The first thing that I noticed was that the orange M&M started leaking color the fastest. I also noticed that as the M&M's colors started leaking, they leaked towards the edge of the paper plate and they barely mixed at all. It looked like a rainbow since the colors hardly blended together. Some questions that I recorded while doing this activity was why do some colors leak faster than others? Why do the colors not really mix? Does the water temperature affect the rate of the color leaki...

                                           Week 10 Lab 04/02/25 To start this week off, on Monday I went to the UI School of the Wild. While there, we did three mini lessons, one over prairies, and we learned about the size of a prairie impacts prey/predators, and also how prairies in Iowa have changed since the 1800s. Next, we went to the Coralville Rez to learn about the organisms that live there and how we can use our knowledge on which organisms can survive in polluted water and non-polluted water to determine whether the water was polluted. Lastly, we visited the Iowa Raptor Project where we learned about different types of Raptors and why they are there. One that specifically stuck out to me was Spirit, the bald eagle. She is almost 40 years old and cannot be released because she has a dislocated wing. Overall, it was a great learning experience! This week was our first we...