Experimental Design

Description

Teams will design, complete, and evaluate an experiment on-site relating to a topic area identified at the time of the competition.

Competition

Each team will have approximately 25 minutes to design and conduct an experiment on a topic announced at the time of the competition, and approximately 25 minutes to prepare a report summarizing their results and conclusions.  Judges will announce when half the time is up, as well as when there is only ten minutes, five minutes, and one minute remaining in the competition to turn in the report.

The topic should have the general format, 'What is the effect of A on B?'  All materials and supplies necessary for answering the question, including calculators, will be provided by the judges.  Laptop computers (with WordPad) will be provided for teams to type their reports rather than write them out by hand. Points will not be taken off for spelling or grammar.

The Laptops will be loaded with a report template based on the following five sections:

1.      Question: What issue, concept, or relationship is being explored experimentally?

2.      Procedure:  How did the team seek to resolve the question? The procedure (experimental design) should clearly state what data were being collected and how the data were collected. A superior procedure should be clear enough that a person reading the report should be able to reproduce the team's work.

3.      Data and Results: Data should be presented in tables and/or graphs, depending on the nature of the data. A sample calculation should be shown for any data column that is the result of a calculation. (For example, velocity is distance divided by time. Distance and time are measured, and how they were measured should have been stated in the Procedure. However, one example of how the velocities were calculated should be included in this section.)

4.      Conclusions: How do the data and results resolve the issue, concept or relationship being explored in the original question?

Tables and graphs, and calculations,  may be presented separately on paper provided.

Note: Since the purpose of the experiment is to allow observation and measurement to show the actual relationship between two or more quantities or properties in nature, it is not necessary to predict what that relationship will be. In other words, it is not necessary to state a hypothesis in the report.


Scoring

Each team's final report will be scored by the judges.  On a 100 point scale, the procedure section will be approximately 25 points, the data and its presentation approximately 25 points, and approximately 25 points for the reasonableness of the conclusions (including logical deduction and error analysis: What problems were encountered? How could the experiment be improved if repeated? What other issues are worth exploring on this topic based on the data collected?) The final 25 points will include correctly stating the question, proper use of units on all numbers, quality and accuracy of the data, etc. The report with the highest score wins.