Category: Science

We got round to looking once more at our Science Online resource over at Editgrid. I had some trouble yesterday with it so I thought I could try dumping the cache in Firefox and that worked really well.

So in the morning I pasted in the data which I added to Excel yesterday and sorted out an average and simple bar graph which you can see I have linked to below, also here.

Then the other year 6 class added their own data – we watched as it updated live, the children loved it and we talked about how the graph and average were also changing.

It would be great to be able to do this with schools in other countries – after all exercise is universal! SO GET INVOLVED – all the instructions are there for you to do the short exercises and then you can add you data into the pool.

Real data we can all share; to help better demonstrate how reliability is imperative in scientific results.

Today we were back to school. We had a good day and pretty much hit the ground running.

I decided that during our revision of the human body, and specifically whilst we were looking at pulse rate we would use our Science Online spreadsheet resource to share results between the 2 Year 6 classes.

Although over the last few months we have had nearly 300 individual views and some positive comments on the resource, nobody has yet been in a position to contribute. So I thought I would look closer to home and share pulse rate data between the classes.

The important principle still remains underpinning why I want this web2.0 tool to work; that more results means more reliability. These tools have to make a difference after all.

So the children recorded the pulse rate (counted for 30 seconds and doubled) when:

• Resting
• After 30 arm circles
• After 30 star jumps
• After 30 side to side jumps

Editgrid has a real time update feature but unfortunately we had a bunch of trouble and the spreadsheet just sort of stopped updating. I decided to save our results in Excel and then import them later – you can still see our “Exercise” sheet and everything ready to go.

You are welcome to have a go and add some data – it took us less than 30 mins to gather the info and add all 30 odd sets of entries to Excel.

Let me know of any other simple experiments or investigations you and your class are doing this term that we could pool the results for.

Image Citation:
Imperial Doughnut, “Pulse” Imperial Doughnut’s Photostream. April 25 2006 <http://farm1.static.flickr.com/44/134998486_c7519227be.jpg>.

Many thanks for all of your responses and comments for this idea. I have created the spreadsheet that I hope to use for the sharing of results over at EditGrid (I find that this is much easier to use and currently has more features than Google Spreadsheets)

Please go to http://www.editgrid.com/user/tbarrett/Science_Online and take a look – I have even added a sheet for comments J

Currently there is an investigation, that started this thought process going, on “The effects of temperature change on the rate of dissolving” but there is no reason why this resource cannot expand as the year progresses and as more and more science is completed in classrooms.

There are no results currently present as I am on half term – but I have grand plans (that is if anyone will join me and my class) in completing the science investigation again but at the same time so we see real time changes as children enter results.

This is work in progress and I would appreciate any suggestions or ways to improve the resource, anything about design or layout too. I already have some ideas about using Flickr and perhaps Google Documents or blogs to collaborate on the scientific method as well as the results.

Please visit and contribute so we can all benefit from the science we do but never share