Thursday Science Labs

Alzar School | 01.09.16

Every Thursday, the Science teachers have an opportunity to take their students out of lecture and put them into a lab.

This week in Ned’s Chemistry class, he had his students create their own lab project for another group of students to complete. Each lab imagined up by the students was required to include chemistry concepts covered throughout the unit thus far. Some of them are named below:

      • Precision/Accuracy
      • Sig Figs
      • Scientific Notation (if applicable)
      • Metric calculation
      • Metric conversions (if applicable)

And beyond creating a lab that applied the topics they’d been discussing for the past couple weeks, the students also had to come up with the lab’s introduction, its testable questions, materials, and procedures.

Students Completing a Lab

What I love about this assignment is that students are bought into their learning in a way that could have never been achieved if Ned had just given them a sheet of paper with instructions on it. They now know metric calculations in a way they didn’t have to before. They understand the challenge of formulating expectations that lead others to outcomes they’d intended. Their ability to process the information in all these different ways will make it impossible for them to forget.

Check out the end-product of a lab the students created on densities:

Densities Science lab Pretty crazy, huh!?