Experimenting on Kids: Science Demo Recap

The science demo went great. I was constantly packed. At least 2 deep, if not more with parents and spectators. Much better than any scientific poster I ever gave.

The premise was simple: catch the ruler. Kids brought their friends over to see it. I loved the "you GOTTA try this!". I think the stickers helped too. I can't confirm, but I'm sure some kids asked others where they got them.

I built up the demo by telling the kids they couldn't do anything before the ruler moved. Then, they had to see it move, process it in their brains, have their brains tell their muscles to move AND catch the ruler. After that build up, some kids looked very nervous. I asked how long they thought it would take them to catch it. Some said "a few seconds". To be fair, the kids ranged in age from 4-12.

I brought two rulers so kids could go head-to-head (and I could speed things up). They loved competing against each other. They'd do it once and then immediately asked to do it again. I told them they were good scientists by wanting to repeat their experiment. (They really liked hearing that). It helped a lot that they'd just done science fair projects and were familiar with experiments.

Most kids tried it 4-5 times. Afterwards, I'd have them read off the distances to me so I could enter them in the calculator so we could find the average. Some were very excited that we were doing averages and explained what they were to me. Others had no idea (but they were 4-5). After we entered the numbers, I asked each student how many times they repeated their experiment. That's when they got stiff and very serious. You could see them counting the number of trials. "I did it four times!" I was proud, kids seeing the importance of repeating experiments and taking averages (more than just one data point) sunk in more than I expected. It turns out that although the brain part was interesting to them, what they REALLY loved was doing the experiment...

• some wanted record the data (even more than participating)
  
• some wanted to see if they could be faster if they used their left hand
• some wanted to see if they were faster than their sibling/parent
• some loved repeating the numbers back to me to figure out the averages
• some loved counting the number of trials
  
• some were just really, really competitive. "Did I win?!"

I gave out a bunch of stickers, a few winning ribbons and left exhausted. Stopped by the grocery store to pick up some items, ate brussel sprouts for dinner, baked off some bread I needed to take to work today and then I crashed.

This morning, I hung the giant data sheets in my office. They're awesome and I love looking at them. In case you're curious, here are the numbers:

Number of students who did the experiment: 47
Total number of trials: 225
Average number of trials: 4.8
Average distance it took for students to catch the ruler: 11.5 inches
Equivalent time it took their nerves to respond: 0.25 seconds. (They don't understand 1/4th of a second, so I told them they were so fast that they could catch 4 rulers in one second. They liked that and would turn to their parents: "I can catch 4 rulers in 1 second!")

Here are all the data for your amusement: