March 13, 1999

The Spring edition of the Saturday Exploration Club began with a general question, what do scientist do first? "Observations," announces Katie. Scientist must use hypothesis, to test their observations and then from this information they make a conclusion. "Why is there not a line from observation to conclusion," Bob1 ask. After a few moments of thought, they says "Because it would be jumping to conclusion!" Bob1 then puts his diagram of the thought process to the test. "How many heads are there on a quarter dollar," Bob1 asks. The explorers immediately say that there is one head on the quarter and others say that there are two. Bob1 disagrees with both of these responses. He says that there are thirteen heads on a quarter. "That's not right," Cam says. Bob1 provides the explorers with magnifying glasses and shows them the side with the eagle. In one of the eagle's tallens, he holds arrows each with an arrowhead. "Now you see that you cannot jump to quick conclusions," Bob1 relays to the explorers. The explorers begin another observation, this time the observations were with eggs. Each explorer is given thirty seconds to try to write down as many observations as they can about the eggs. After they have completed their individual observations, then they compare their observations to think of new test that they can try. "Why don't we crack it open," asks Ryan. "Ok, let's do that," Bob1 replys. So he cracks open the eggs and find out that their first five guesses were correct. The explorers say that the final egg must be a raw egg. So, when Bob1 cracked the egg open they found out that the egg was not raw or hard boiled, it was filled with water. After their "eggcellent" discoveries with the eggs the explorers are "eggsposed" to some methods of solving problems dealing with probablilty. The explorers use a spreadsheet to determine the probalibity that a certain number would appear more than once. They use a formula to help the computer better process their request. After completing the formula the explorers run their equation. After a few moments of caculations, the computer displays their results and they are amazed at the number of times certain numbers appeared. "Today was fun," says Kati as she watches the results appear. The explorers then experiment with different formulas and then summarize to their parents about all of the interesting things that they learned.