Cycle 1 testing was done so we all moved on to something more fun: spaghetti bridges! I punched two holes in little cups and took out a bag of spaghetti (I have a closet at the back of my room that has all my supplies for all my activities) and my tin of pennies.
Each group of students created a bridge by threading one strand of spaghetti through the holes. One student held the ends of the spaghetti while another gently placed pennies in the cup until the spaghetti broke.
The students were surprised how many pennies it took to break the spaghetti! Once it did, they repeated the experiment with 2 strands of spaghetti, then 3, and so on. The data collection took quite a while. I was so impressed when I heard a group say "We should redo with 3 'cause that number was higher than 4." The data is not perfectly linear by any means, but it was generally increasing.
Next, they had to create a scatter plot by hand, then enter the data in the graphing calculator and perform a linear regression to get the equation of the line of best fit.
We will continue with this tomorrow - there are questions for them to answer before we start over with spaghettinni!
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