• Question: What is important to consider when planning an experiment? Why?

    Asked by Izzy to Joe, Jos, Kate, Lisa, Pierre on 13 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Kate Dobson

      Kate Dobson answered on 13 Nov 2014:

      You need to work out exactly what it is that you want to test. Are there conditions that you need to recreate (or avoid) to test that? How will you test is in a systematic way? Do you need to do one experiment or several ones with slightly different conditions to get your answer? Can you do the experiment and be safe? If you can’t be safe you can’t do the experiment and you have to start from scratch and redesign it all.

      I try and have everything I need prepared well in advance and test things in the lab before doing the experiment for real. You also need to make sure you write down everything that happened so that you can work out why things did what they did afterwards. This is just as important when it doesn’t work – how else can you work out why it didn’t work!?

    • Photo: Lisa Simmons

      Lisa Simmons answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      I love planning experiments and it is the first thing that I teach my students.
      You need to consider all your variables, and plan which ones you are going to control, and which ones you are going to test against one another. You need to think how to make all the measurements as accurate as possible, but also to make a note of errors that you think you might have. I like to plan out what analysis I will do and what information I will need to do that.

      Of course nothing ever works out the first time round 🙂

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