On the first day of class, Dr. Shingleton handed my table (consisting of Margo, Ukasha, and Vishal) these little contraptions called mystery tubes. She told us to observe the tubes, and to record any information we found that was interesting. You can see what I wrote down in my notebook found just below. At first, I was really confused as to what the purpose of this assignment was. I wasn’t sure if the point was to actually create a functioning mystery tube or to just gain experience about the scientific process. In reality, the purpose of this assignment was a blend of both, giving us a taste of what real scientific inquiry looks like. At first, we thought that the tube had a pulley system and weight inside of it because of the properties we observed while playing around with it. You can see our initial design right below. During class, Dr. Shingleton had us put on a “mystery tube gallery” where each of the groups put their concept drawings on display, during this time each person left a positive note on each drawing, and let a note on something they could change in their drawing. For our group, most of the positive comments mentioned some of our specificity in our drawing, while the lack of an explanation for our pulley system was something most people said we should change. You can see how many notes were left for our group below. While testing out our concepts, we modeled our string mechanisms on the outside of the tube, just to be sure everything would work. We quickly realized while modeling that a pulley system couldn’t possibly be the mechanism inside the tubes because there were too many parts and the pulley system would be too large to fit inside the tube. Because of this, we thought of a much more practical solution to our mystery tube mystery. Our final solution was two strings and a washer. It was simple and easy to make. In fact, my group assembled our final model just 20 minutes before class. You can see the actual model we constructed just below. The saying “All models are wrong, some are useful” is a helpful saying to keep in mind when using models to understand concepts. Unfortunately, this saying didn’t hold true when it came to our group because we constructed our model literally perfectly. Other than using the exact same materials the original, we couldn’t have come closer to making an exact mystery tube. For the purpose of a reflection however, I’ll go back to my previous experience with making a model in a science class, my mitosis & meiosis modeling project in genomics. We modeled mitosis and meiosis using candy. Obviously, we weren’t anywhere close to actually replicating the real processes of mitosis and meiosis, but the experience helped deepen our understanding of how they actually worked. In doing so, we learned that the saying “All models are wrong, some are useful” refers to the fact that models are inherently flawed, yet they deepen our understanding.Much like the process of building a mystery tube, true science doesn’t reveal the “solution” immediately. Much like studying a living person’s brain, we couldn’t just cut into the mystery tube to figure out how it worked. Rather, we had to collaborate, share, and analyze our ideas with others. One factor that I think our group excelled at compared to other groups was our consideration of practicality for our tube. We realized early on that a pulley system was very complicated and would really not be practical, so we searched for a different solution to our mystery tube problem. Much in the same way, science requires us to be practical and look for solutions that we could actually achieve.
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AuthorAllan Kalapura. Holland Hall class of 2019. Archives
November 2018
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