Friday 19 October 2012

Expand the Story?

Well it has been the prescribed week that we had to do the research before the Minecraft public was going to riot and the results we have are not giving us a clear picture. So there will be a discussion about good scientific practice in today's lesson, we will have a look at the data we have got and hopefully decide that we do not have any idea what the other scientists had found before their accident and this should lead to more research.

I must say the results do show an interesting trend (read completely not what I expected :D) it appears that the higher you drop something in Minecraft the faster it falls, that is the number of blocks travelled per second increases. So perhaps we need to go even higher to see if we can hit 'terminal velocity' in Minecraft. Perhaps not in this story, maybe another research project later on.

So anyway about expanding the story, I am thinking that since we are out of time and still do not have a clear picture as we have not got enough raw data, some experiments were only completed by one group of students while others were completed by 3, and there are some odd data values also (all of which will be discussed at our scientific meeting this afternoon). Perhaps I can let the Minecraft public riot (read set fires in the world, maybe half destroy some buildings with tnt possibly while they are in the game researching) and put the pressure on to complete all the research as quick as possible so that the entire population doesn't riot.

This would, after our discussion, hopefully let them carry through with the rest of the research, get a clear picture of Minecraft gravity and how it does not relate to 'real' gravity through everyone completing each experiment and allowing a much larger repetition and therefore a better scientific method prior to delivering our results to the public.

(Insert teaching for an hour here) :D

And 1 hour later I am back to write some more, and have, after discussions with another member of staff that will be beginning this on Monday, decided to just run with the results we have, talk about the scientific method, not allow them the extra time, as they can 'find' the information in the results we have got I have decided after a closer look.

So now the new plan is to get the students to graph the results I have collated (as my role as lead scientist I collated the results for them) and then write up a formal report to the Minecraft government so that they can explain to the public what the results mean.

Thanks for reading, this has been a pretty 'messy' post, my ideas are all over the place, so feel free to comment below and put some more ideas out there and more updates to come soon.

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