Designing your own experiments for the purposes of following an inductive line of enquiry is, well, the heartbeat of modern so called ‘hard science’.
IB juniors were challenged this week to create experiments which investigated factors which affect reaction times in Lincoln students.
Reaction times are a measurement of the efficiency of what neurologists call a ‘stimulus-response pathway’, a pathway that ‘bio-electricity’ passes through the body in order to coordinate a response. Processing time in the specific parts of the brain are also involved.
There is a whole wealth of contributing factors involved in determining how fast a Lincoln school student reacts to something.
Each IB student constructed their own research question, and followed their own line of investigation. Students with similar areas of interest collaborated, to allow for complex methodology and sufficient data collection.
Student interest included:
- gender
- participation in team sports
- different flavours of candies and taste-activated response
- coffee drinking
- amount of sleep
- posture
- length of time spend sitting in one place
(thanks to students for permission to publish these photos. Please contact me if there is an issue with any published photo)
