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to be honest I didn't read the rules they gave us XD . I rather skimmed it. However it must have been in their rules for everyone at the Norcal State tournament. It's not an official rule though.

mnstrviola wrote:to be honest I didn't read the rules they gave us XD . I rather skimmed it. However it must have been in their rules for everyone at the Norcal State tournament. It's not an official rule though.

oh alright thanks : )

What would be an example of "Results not relating to the DV"?

EpicFailure wrote:What would be an example of "Results not relating to the DV"?

That would be anything that you noticed that could affect your results, but wasn't actually your dependent variable.
For example, using the generic 'change the height of a ramp and measure the distance a car will travel off it' some observations would include:
At the 30 cm ramp, the car had a pronounced tendancy to veer sharply to the right.
At the 10 cm ramp, the car was jolted each time it crossed the transition between the ramp and the floor.
There were some irregularities on the floor that caused slight changes in the direction and speed of the car.

These observations are often closely related to the experimental errors.

FOURTH IN THE NATION YES!!!!!!!!!

XJcwolfyX wrote:FOURTH IN THE NATION YES!!!!!!!!!

Nice job! I thought the topic of the experiment was a little weird but it was nationals and you can expect anything.

What was the experiment topic?

mnstrviola wrote:What was the experiment topic?

It was that you had to find the acidity of drinks commonly found in schools and find which one was the worst for your teeth. We predicted sprite but it was actually lemonade.

RBears6 wrote:

mnstrviola wrote:What was the experiment topic?

It was that you had to find the acidity of drinks commonly found in schools and find which one was the worst for your teeth. We predicted sprite but it was actually lemonade.

C Division was something about the sense of touch, given toothpicks and Q-tips. WM did number of toothpicks (as proxy for surface area) vs. pain (on a self-reported 0 to 10 scale). I don't like the subjectivity associated with pain as a variable, but that's nothing compared to what the B Division one was.

I know Gelinas was second-tiered for doing concentration of one liquid (rather than using multiple liquids) vs. pH, because "Sprite vs. lemonade" is qualitative rather than quantitative (which is just bad experimental form). I don't blame them, and I think it's pretty ridiculous that the experiment apparently required them to have a qualitative IV.

These qualitative variables in general are driving me crazy. It's generally terrible experimental procedure, and to make that a requirement of the event is teaching kids bad scientific practices. Yeah, sure, you can compare the pH of Sprite and lemonade, but how do you establish a trend? It sounds to me like anyone who did an actually valid, quantitative IV experiment would have been second-tiered, because they wanted to see this ridiculous apples-to-oranges comparison.

That lady gave us the rubric . . . I thought that would kill our score.