The Lab · Workshop 06 · Practice
Run a Real One
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Experiment.
The Lab · Workshop 06 · Practice
Five steps. About 25 minutes. Up to 7 stars. The constellation you're building is called First Experiment.
An experiment is a hypothesis put under fair conditions. Fair means: only one thing changes. Everything else stays exactly the same.
If you change two things at once, you don't know which one caused the result. Real experiments isolate one variable — the thing you change — and keep everything else as identical as possible.
The thing you don't change is called the control. If your bean plant gets more water and you also move it to a sunnier spot, you can't tell whether the water or the sun made the difference.
By the end of this workshop you'll have designed one fair experiment with one variable and one control.
That's the warm-up. When you've actually read it — not skimmed — tap below.
Pick the fair ones.
Click a piece, then what it means.
Pick something you could test at home. Write the variable (one thing you change), the control (what stays the same), and the measurement (how you'll know).
Stuck? Test: does paper towel dry hands faster wet vs. damp? Variable: how wet the paper towel starts. Control: same paper towel brand, same hand size, same drying motion. Measurement: time in seconds.
One sentence.