Scientific Observation

Here are a variety of lesson ideas and activities designed to address the DoDEA Science 7 curriculum objective "Observe and accurately record objects and events by counting, comparing, estimating, and measuring" a class might be directed to conduct several annealings, varying whatever conditions they choose (for example, changing the number of charges or the charge on the walls). Annealing is the general term applied to the process a substance goes through as it hardens, or "freezes" into a solid state.

Students should record both qualitative and quantitative observations in journal style with a notebook or a word processor document. Much of the process of recording quantitative observations is facilitated by features of RealSim Surface.

It is important that in such an activity the students also "describe what they see" (for example, "higher charge on the walls makes the charges gather at the center" or "with more than x charges, the final pattern is less regular" or something as simple as "for each particular number of charges, the final patterns are almost always the same"). If students notice something irregular, they could attempt to reproduce the irregularity, and perhaps attempt to guess what caused the irregularity based on their previous observations. The teacher might suggest to them a way to test their conjectures. They can

observe the annealed pattern of, say, ten runs each of 1 charge, then 2 charges, etc. and try to come up with a general pattern
use the tool palette to fix the locations of some number of charges, randomize the positions of the rest, and see what happens. Can they predict the final configuration based on the initial configuration?
measure the distances between adjacent charges in some lattice and find the mean, median, and range of this data
move the charges around after the annealing (or before the annealing) to see if they can achieve a lower energy. How much lower? What makes the energy lower?