Week 4 Reflection

What were the largest struggles this week? how were you able to overcome them? How might you avoid them in the future?

This week was a tough week for us. We didn’t follow our schedule at all. Our experiment has a specialty that our schedule is closely bonded to the response given by our animals for it is a animal behavior lab. Our predict was that the parakeet will sense the food in the maze and then find the food. They may have the ability to memorize the shortest route for their telencephalon (part of the brain that is in charge of memory) is relatively larger. However, we made a mistake that we didn’t think in the way of birds. They prefer flying rather than walking. So basically they don’t like maze and they always want to escape from the net covering the top.

Therefore, our lab for the birds to find food in the maze fails. I thought to change the maze into a linear shape and let the bird to come back to the cage. According to my observation, the birds will communicate and call their fellows to come back to “home” once one is out of the community. However, we thought that birds would be really panicked in the maze and always wanted to fly. So we decided to change our lab using hamsters instead of birds. So …… we will simply keep the birds as pet.

🙂 Selfie facing the failure

 

What we did this week:

• We bought the nets to cover the top in case the bird escape from the maze (they still escaped actually ……)
• We bought extra food for the birds
• We measured the distance of every route in the maze
• We developed our maze to prevent escaping of birds better
• ……
• And then we need to DO ALL OF THE EXPERIMENT AGAIN because the birds don’t cooperate!!!

Measurement

Development and treatment

Mazes covered by nets

Birds’ food market

What we learnt:

• Birds will NEVER cooperate with experiment force them to walk instead of fly.
• Birds live as a community will communicate with each other to lead the lost bird come home
• Budgerigars have the ability to memorize different person and have little sense of smell
• Birds are hard to catch and control when doing experiment
• It is nearly impossible to let the birds be familiar to you in 10 days
•  We need to use animals that are easy to control when doing experiment instead of just focusing on their intelligence to increase the feasibility of the experiment

How to overcome?

• We borrowed 2 hamsters from Ms. Virginia and we will do the experiment on them.
• Because the mazes were destroyed when we tried to catch the escaped bird, we will develop the maze while reconstructing them.
• We will try to find the most suitable treatment for the tested animal, for example, put what the tested animal desires the in the end of the maze.
• A linear maze is much better than a maze which twists and turns.

Science Fair Week 3 Video Reflection

This is the third week of the science fair. We bought our birds and borrowed our LEGOs. We started to build our maze as well. So this week is when we really start implementing our experiment and this week is the preparing stage. I think we are on our track, but maybe a little bit behind. This really depends on how our birds behave.

I post my video reflection on bilibili. I think bilibili is the platform that looks like “Chinese YouTube” the most. People can write their comment under the video and there’s also a type of comment that can float on the screen when people watch the video. The website is really fun and it’s a popular website for young people.

The link of my video is:

http://www.bilibili.com/video/av9704816/

This is the cover of my video

Science Project Reflection Week 2

Talking with teacher

The note I took through the talking

This week was the second week of the science project. Last week I and my partner did not manage to share our questions to the classmates, so that we did not have any feedback for our plan. This week when we went to the class, Ms. Deana talked to us about our plan and pointed out some realistic questions such as whether the money is enough for us to buy the birds, and so on.

The introduction

We made the introduction part together. However at that time we did not know that the introduction should be written individually. Anyway, we understood that in the introduction part we need to first introduce the background, and then we need to include purpose of the lab and the hypothesis. Sandy and I wrote the introduction separately. She was in charge of the purpose and hypothesis parts and I was in charge of the basic background illustrating.

Through looking for the information, I found that google scholars is the most useful search engine. Comparing to the links given that were related to the topic I typed in on Google, the links in google scholars were far more reliable. For example, I typed in Budgerigars and learning these two key words in Google, and I got plenty of links that talk about budgerigars as pets or some websites that could only give me some basic information of budgerigars. The only link I found useful on google was a comprehensive introduction of budgerigars as a species of parakeet. Through this information, I knew the habit of the budgerigars and its academic name, which was Melopsittacus undulates. Use this key word in google scholar, I found many useful research about budgerigars and the information in them could be used in our introduction part.

What we should do but we haven’t done yet

We need to find out the price of the budgerigars and the food, cages in need to make sure that we can afford to purchase them. And the amount of budgerigars we can get is based on the price of every individual. But there was a problem that the market was closed before we could get time to go there after school. And the time during lunch was not enough for us to go there. Therefore we checked the price on TaoBao, however the TaoBao store may not be able to give us the receipt. What’s more, we need to find whether there’s someone that can lend us some LEGO. If there’s no-one can give us some LEGO without paying, we can not afford buying them. Thus we may probably change the material.

What we are going to do next

We need to settle down the specific plan of our lab. It should include our time schedule as well. Through the experience of the religion project, I learnt that starting early is always good for us. If there’s any error, we can then have time to fix them and redesign them to save our lab.

When writing your planning document what struggles did you have and what areas of the experiment are you most concerned with?

During writing the planning document, we found that we were really not sure about the feasibility of this test and there were so much unknowns for this experiment depends highly on another living things. We were really struggle on how we should train the birds and to what extent we should train them. What if they can not behave well in the experiment? What should we do then? These are that problems we most concerned with.

Reflection of the First Week of Science Project

In this week, we quickly figured out what we wanted to do about this science project. I and my partner, Sandy, were both interested in animal behaviors and we wanted to do a lab based on the response given by alive animals. This quick process of figuring out what to focus on was pretty good. We then narrowed it down to a specific topic that we would like to mimic the lab that put mouses in a maze to see whether they can memorize the shortest rout well. Considering that using mouse might not be appropriate because we definitely could not keep them as pets. So we focused on a kind of little bird that could not fly to do this lab. We also kind of decided that we were going to test the time the animal would spent in the maze to find the hided food to evaluate their memorizing skill.

The most difficult part so far was that we were really confused about this lab. For example, will the animal we choose at last be clever enough to memorize the routes? Which variable should be defined as the dependent variables? The time or the times? What further conclusion can we draw? We are kind of sticking right now and we are looking forward to the question presenting so that we can have some feedbacks and advices. So adjusting the plan of the lab and the questions we have for this lab is next week’s focus. Generally we may search some similar labs to determine the capability of this lab in many aspects and ask teacher for help as well.

We haven’t presented our question to the class yet and we are looking forward to the feedbacks.