Planning and Carrying Out

 Due to time constraints and technology - the lab had to be modified in order to fit within a 50 minute "live" class with up to 30 minutes of independent student time.  

To fit this timeline, the slides showing the steps needed for the investigation were removed from the presentation and made available for students as supplemental information.  Looking at the digital version from September, this would translate to slides 19-23 being removed and slide 18 being modified for students to submit ideas directly to the Google Chat. 

With that in Mind....Planning and Carrying out the Investigation

PLANNING 

By opening up the chat and allowing students to brainstorm ideas freely, they were able to come up with all sorts of ideas.  Since an earlier slide had shown a pepsi bottle, a few students in each class suggested using soda for the test and that generally became THE idea everyone wanted to use.  

All of the class were able to point out out how hard it would be to replicate a study which relied on shaking a bottle of soda to produce bubbles/gas.  There was some talk of attaching the bottle to a shake weight but they had a hard time figuring out a way to measure the gas released.  For temperatures, everyone agreed on getting the soda as close to freezing as possible while another bottle should be at room temperature while another needed to be left in a warm location - which added a level not in the original demonstration.  This also resulted in a fun conversation after the final experiment was revealed as many of them remembered lessons in 6th and 7th grade where they needed to have three points to test.  

In my first period class, there was also a rather interesting conversation about Diet Pepsi versus regular Pepsi for effectiveness.  In 7th grade, students had explored "real" vs "artificial" sugar in baking and how you could not use most fake sugars to successfully bake.   Should also note here that a number of male students have built a Pepsiocracy which probably added to their interest in the gases of soda.  This interest has extended to the point of one of them creating a SEL engagement involving Pepsi. 

Once they had latched on to the soda idea it was rather hard to get them to switch over to Alka Seltzer but it did give me a few ideas for how to do this lesson in a physical classroom.  

CARRYING OUT

During class, we watched the video twice with a discussion in between.  During the first watch, the chat feature was turned off to ensure students were watching the video while they were able to drop comments during the second watch.  Comments regarding the investigation were pretty straight forward, a few students did go back to not having a third test but the majority of them still voted "effective" during a class poll on the experiment style.