20 Time Final Blog Post

For my 20 Time Project, I tested the placebo effect to see if it actually works. To do this I created 15 general knowledge questions, and gave one group of 6 people a positive feedback about the test before they took it and another 6 people negative feedback. For an example for the positive group, before the test I said, "This test is a very basic general knowledge quiz, nothing to worry about. Everyone who takes this test passes." I wanted to see if the people who received negative feedback did worse on the test than the people who received positive feedback. After testing I found that the people who received positive feedback did better, but it wasn't a drastic difference, they only did slightly better. Here is a picture of the graphs I made of my data:

 As you can tell from the graph, the differences are subtle, but they are there. I think that if I had maybe taken a bigger group of people, or more questions I would have gotten a more dramatic difference in my data. So if I could do my project again that is probably what I would change.

Evaluating myself on this project, I think I did a good job. I spent my class time effectively by researching for the project, learning more about the effect so I could effectively plan an experiment around it without the use of pills like most placebo experiments are conducted, prepping the experiment (such as writing the general knowledge questions), and analyzing my data. I would give myself an A because I think I worked hard throughout this project and produced the results as well. Here is a link to my previous blog on my 20 time : http://iisiyonaii.blogspot.com/2017/03/placebo-effect-research.html

Pig Dissection Reflection

In this lab, we dissected a pig and learned about its anatomy, its different parts and what they look like. From this lab I was able to see what the different organs and body structures actually look like, and apply what I had learned from the vodcasts about the different systems such as respiratory and digestive systems in the dissection. For an example, I was able to see the heart and lungs which were part of the respiratory system, and also the intestines, stomach, and esophagus which are all part of the digestive system.
This dissection relate to me and my body, because a lot of the structures in the pig are similar to the structures in a human body and also my body. So by doing the pig dissection I was able to learn a lot about myself and how my body functions on a day to day basis.

 Video for Pig Dissection:

20 Time Individual Reflection

For my 20 time project, I decided to test the placebo effect to see if it really works. The reason I chose this experiment is because I had read about the placebo effect in the book Chomp by Carl Hiassen and wondered if the placebo effect was a real thing that could actually have an effect on us. I decided that 20 time was the perfect place to test this and find out, because it was something that has interested me ever since I read that book. My goal at the end of this project was to find out if the placebo effect really did work. After researching about the effect a bit in the beginning stages of 20 time, I made the hypothesis that it would work, but only to a certain extent (there would not be a huge change).

Initially my experiment was to give one group of students who say they are extremely tired in the morning a caffeine pill and the other group of students a placebo pill which had nothing in it. However I quickly realized that I would probably not be allowed to give people pills as part of my experiment as that is not allowed. My second experiment was to gather a group of 10-20 students and give them a general knowledge test. However before the test one group was told that it was easy and they shouldn't worry about it, and one group was told that it was very hard but they should try their best on it. I thought that with the positive feedback in the beginning the students would do better on the test and with the negative feedback the students would do worse.

To test my experiment, after church I gathered a group of 12 students who had volunteered to participate who were in the 8-11th grade. I put 6 of them in one room and 6 of them in another room and administered the tests with the negative and positive feedback. After they left, I tallied up how many questions each person got wrong and found that the effect did work to some extent. There was a difference between getting positive and negative feedback before the test, but it was not very drastic. The people who had gotten the positive feedback had done slightly better.

I think this project was a success in that I learned a lot about the placebo effect, and I was able to explore something that was interesting to me and learn about it.  I learned a lot of valuable lessons and soft skills; the most important one being time management. Since we were only given a short amount of time each week to work on the project, I had to learn how to split up how I spent my time efficiently. I also came up across different articles with conflicting information, so I learned how to find which article was really credible and which one wasn't and which information was actually accurate. If I had a chance to do this project again, something I would do differently is spend less time researching and more time doing. I spent the majority of time in the beginning of this project researching when I could have progressed further with my experiment. I think I spent too much time preparing for the experiment when I could have started earlier.

Although this experiment was very interesting, I don't think I will be continuing it. This is because my only question was to know if the effect worked and I accomplished that through this experiment. However, I will share this with others because I found the fact that our minds can play simple tricks on us fascinating, and I think it will be fascinating to others as well.

Link to my last 20 time post: Click here

Unit 9 Reflection

In this Unit I learned about how organisms are classified. I learned about the different taxonomic levels--from largest to smallest--Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and species. Then we went more into depth about what were the different domains and kingdoms, and what species could be classified into them. There are three domains, Archae, Bacteria, and Eukarya. Eukarya is split into 4 kingdoms, protista, animalia, plantae, and fungi. Animalia is a multi cellular heterotroph. Plantae is a photosynthetic organism. Fungi is a consumer that feed on either dead or decaying organic matter. Finally, Protista is anything that doesn't fit into the other three kingdoms. Inside these kingdoms, you can find many phylums. For an example in the Plantae, some of the phylums are angiosperms and gymnosperms. Gymnosperms are cone bearing plants and angiosperms are flowering plants. Once you keep grouping things together into smaller and smaller groups based on similar characteristics, you finally get a species. In this Unit we also learned more about evolution and how these organisms came to place and how they all became such different species. We learned that life started from unicellular organisms and gradually multicellular, and when these organisms started to adapt to their environments they developed different features, and thus new species were evolved. These species, continued to evolve with some of them dying out, and through this constant process of evolution, we have the organisms that we see today.

To enforce this idea of evolution, in this Unit we also did the What on Earth Evolved (WEE) presentations. We each got to pick one organism from the book written by Christopher Lloyd, and present on how it evolved and how it had an effect on us. I picked algae as my organism. I learned a lot about algae that I didn't know before such as it is being made into biofuels which could cut down pollution, and that it was such a crucial part of our food web. Presenting was fairly easy as I felt like I knew my material well, and I felt comfortable enough to come and talk in front of the class. If I could do it over, I would probably make more of an effort to memorize my slides, because I feel that reading off of slides does not get your information across as well as speaking does. However this was a good learning experience, and I definitely know more about public speaking and algae than I did before.

All in all, I would say this Unit was one of my favorites. I love learning about species and animals that I never knew existed. One of my favorite parts was looking at some of these animals up close. We had a collection of dissected animals in the class, and we had to identify what taxa they belonged in. I loved looking at these animals up close, especially the ones that I had never seen before.

Unit 8 Reflection:

Previous Reflection


Here is my WEE presentation: