Conducting a Fair Test: Does a car travel farther?

This week we are writing our first fair test in class. Students are learning all about how to conduct a fair test while learning about all the important parts of an experiment.

Our big question that we are trying to find the answer to is:

Does the height of a ramp affect the distance a car travels?

In order to do this we need to create a list of materials, draw a set up of our lab, write a step by step procedure and write our first hypothesis. Students also agreed that we needed to do many trials for each height because sometimes accidents occur and that affect our data. Many students believe that the height of the ramp will increase the speed the car is traveling but not the distance the car travels. By the end of this experiment they will have a better idea of this is true or not.

After writing our lab students spent two class periods conducting their experiment. They were careful to line up the ramps, accurately measure the distance the car travelled and record that information in their data tables. They were able to determine three repeated patterns after examining their data:

1.) The higher the ramp, the farther the car travelled.

2.) The higher the ramp, the faster the car travelled.

3.) The higher the ramp the more out of control the path of the car (it turned and flipped more frequently).

Please take a peak at the awesome work they did in the pictures below!