TIP reflection

When we were first given the list of topics for us to choose from, the topic: “A ball falling through a liquid in a container” immediately caught my eye. It was something that I had never researched on before and I was really interested and excited to try something new.

At the early stages of our project, we had to come up with a proposal with two experiments that we would be conducting. At first, we thought that it would be quite easy because we could just apply the knowledge that we had from lesson to this project. However, it was when we dug in deeper into the topic that we found out that it was not as easy as it seemed. When we were doing the proposal, we realised that the limited knowledge we had about kinematics was far not enough. We had to do more literature research, and acquire more information regarding the topic before we could even start planning the experiment.

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When I just started researching about the background of the topic, I was overwhelmed by the load of information that we had to know. Stoke’s law, drag force, drag coefficient, viscous force… These were all terms that I had never heard of before. The problem that I encountered is that I could not understand these terms and concept, and hence I could not move on to plan the actual experiment.

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After doing more research, I finally managed to understand these basic knowledge and our group finally started working on our proposal. In our proposal, one of our experiments is about finding out if the density of the solution affects the acceleration of the ball falling through it. However, when we actually started doing our experiment, we realised that we were not able to find the acceleration of the object because the acceleration-time graph that we had plotted on Tracker had many fluctuations and random errors. At that point of time, we were all a bit flustered, as it meant that we had to change our whole research question. We were really frustrated and honestly, I really felt like giving up. However, we pressed on, and worked even more closely as a team to try to correct this problem. From this, I realised the importance of teamwork. As long as we work as a team and help each other clarify each other’s doubts, success is just a leap away.

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Apart from this problem, there were many other obstacles that we had encountered along the way. As we had to measure the mass of the saline solution for us to find out its density, we had to weigh the measuring cylinder containing the solution every time we added more salt. The weighing scale in school was only able to weigh masses up to 1200g, and our measuring cylinder was far more heavy than that. Hence, we had to transfer the solution to a lighter beaker first, and transfer the solution back to the measuring cylinder again after obtaining the mass. This process was indeed very time consuming and tedious, and we were running short of time. As our first experiment required far more time as compared to others, we decided to only focus on that experiment and abandon our second experiment that we had planned earlier on. This was very unexpected as we had already made the plans for the other experiment, but we had to give up on that experiment at the last minute. Through this, I learnt that change is inevitable. Instead of panicking and giving up, we should learn to accept change and work even harder to get used to the change.

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Also, when we were analysing the data using Tracker, we realised that the marble could not be tracked by the automatic tracker as it was transparent. Just as we were lost and had no idea how to continue, Mr Ang helped us by teaching us that we could use manual tracking instead of automatic tracking. Although this process is a lot more tedious than automatic tracking, we gladly accepted it as it was the only option we had. As one of our groupmate was not here when Mr Ang explained the process to us, we taught her how to use manual tracking afterwards and she was able to help analysis the data as well. Through this process, the importance of teamwork is emphasised as we helped each other when we do not understand some things.

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Through our research, we were able to find out how we can apply this concept to our daily lives. This made our research process much more interesting as we knew that what we had learnt would be able to be used in reality.

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This journey has indeed been an enriching one and it not only allowed me to grow in terms of knowledge, but also allowed me to grow as a person in general. I would like to thank my group members for tirelessly working on this project with me and during this journey, we forged deeper friendships with each other.

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Although in the end, we were not able to calculate the theoretical value and conduct our second experiment, we all know that it is the process and not the outcome that counts