5E's air resistance experiment

This week in 5E we finished off our experiment on air resistance. After previously studying volcanoes, we were interested in discovering how to help areas which have been affected by eruptions. We wanted to discover which parachute would drop the fastest and consequently help the most people. Below are Joshua's findings:

We tested different types of parachutes and timed to see how quickly they dropped. My group altered the string length and our fastest time was 1.35 seconds. It was quite challenging to measure this time because it was such a quick drop. We knew to make it a fair test we had to keep all the other variables the same (height of drop, force and surface area, for example). Other teams chose different variables to alter. The problem I found challenging was the height of the drop: some people were taller than others, so the test wasn't fair. We solve this problem, we  measured the height against the wall and ensured that all parachutes were dropped from this height. We found that in this experiment, string length affected the time taken for the parachute to drop: the longer the string, the slower the drop. However, we would like to repeat the experiment again under different conditions to measure the accuracy of these results. 

Mouldy Bread!!

This week 6B carried out an experiment to test the best way to preserve bread. We have set it up and eagerly await our results, however stomach churning they may be! Keep looking for updates. 

Micro-organisms experiment - 6F

After allowing our mouldy bread experiment to fester over Christmas, we were finally able to write up our findings this week. We were investigating the effect of mould growth on bread that was stored in different containers, or no container at all. Here is Mathusha's write up:


Conclusion:


The bread on the plate had no mould growing on it. The bread in the freezer bag had the most mould and finally, the bread in the Tupperware had the second most mould.


We think this happened because micro-organisms need to breathe and eat so that means the bread in the Tupperware and freezer bag had air for the micro-organisms to breathe and they had the bread to eat however, the bread on the plate (despite providing food to eat and having access to air to breathe) lost its moisture and ended up having no mould on it. It just went hard and dry. This shows us that micro-organisms also need moisture to grow and reproduce.

This means my prediction was wrong. I predicted that the bread on the plate would have the most mould because I thought it would have more air to breathe and reproduce, but the bread in the freezer bag had the most mould and the bread on the plate had no micro-organisms visible.

Evaluation:

The test was fair because we only changed one variable. It would be interesting to test: Putting three different types of bread in the same container (a freezer bag) and you put the three different types of bread in the same location and see which type of bread produces the most mould.