Scott’s blog…

What did you like about this project?

I liked this science project much more than the previous ones. This because we were give a simple project briefcase but still had to cover quite a lot of content.

What did you not like about this project?

Overall, the project was good but i didn’t enjoy having to keep all our documents in the folder. This became very unorganized and sometimes the sheets would fall out.

Suggest 3 ideas that could improve/make this project more engaging.

I think that we should also have to come up with a strategy that will reduce greenhouse effects. This would make the project more interesting. Secondly, our final product should relate more to the information we have researched about.

Did you like the driving question? Explain why/why not.

I enjoyed this PBL project over many other projects because we had a fairly simple project breifcase. This meant that a lot of the work was marked during the process so we didn’t have to rush all our work on the last minute.

Secondly, we were provided with just enough work to complete each lesson (50minutes approx.) if we worked well. I thought this was very effective because we didn’t have to rush it too much so a lot of the information was absorbed. Some people had extra time to help others who didn’t understand and rethink about the driving question.

Lastly, the driving question had an open answer so we had some freedom to choose our answer. Although this seemed easy, we had to do lots of research to backup our final conclusion with evidence.

I think that this project was very well organized and had a good balance of homework, experiments and information that had to be covered.

In todays experiment I learnt that when two plates separate, a ridge or trench is formed. Magnetic strips are also created and illustrated as parralel lines on diagrams. The earth’s crust pulls away and a valley is made in the middle. This occurs on the oceon floor.

Today is our second lesson since our new project has started. We have started to look at colliding plates and how they react when they clooide against each other. When two tectonic plates collide, they either form a hill and both rise, or one plate will go underneath the other. This will depend on the nearby terrain, underwater ridge or mountains are formed.

Convection Currents

In todays lesson we tried to observe the convection currents in a beaker according to different temperatures. When the potassium crystals are placed in heated water they create currents and move up and odwn the beaker in a circular motion. When ice is placed on the beaker the potassium crystals stay still and don’t move whereas the hotter the temperature, the more they travel.