Scientific Method and Graphing

Scientific Method and Graphing

Objectives - Students will be able to: 1.Explain what an independent and a dependent variable are. 2.Properly label a data table and graph 3.Create a graph from a data table

Scientific Method

Hopefully, this is a review for most of you. By the raise of hands, what are the steps to the scientific method?

Scientific Method Make an observation Form an educated guess (hypothesis)

Test hypothesis* Form a rule

* It is ok for the test to show that your hypothesis was wrong

Variables

We will spend most of our lab time doing experiments and trying to understand the data. Variable ? Something that changes

How many variables are there in any given experiment?

Independent variable ? the one variable that is deliberately changed Dependent variable ? the one variable that is affected by the independent variable; this is what you measure Control variable ? any variable that is held constant; there can be many variables in this category

Variables

Check for understanding ? You're tapping the gas pedal in your car to see what happens to the A/C. Identify the independent and the dependent variable.

Check for understanding ? You're adding water to juice to see how diluted it gets. Which are the independent, dependent, and control variables?

Data Tables and Graphs

During the experiment, we measure how much each variable changes. At the end, we have a lot of data that needs to be put in some format that makes it easy for people to understand. For this, we use data tables and graphs.

Check for understanding ? With your table partner, come up with at least three examples of where you see data shown in a table and three examples of where you see data shown in a graph.

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