It's that
time of year, we're entering the final few weeks before the finished projects
are displayed to the Oak House world. The playgrounds are amok with activity
with students beginning to carry out their experiments using the other students
as their participants. Some of the most interesting projects include:
- Do different types of chocolate affect our ability to learn new abilities using hand-eye coordination?
- How many values can you understand at a glance (without counting) and what affects this?
- When should we add the milk to a coffee to ensure it stays warm for longer?
- Will smaller children endure a choice they dislike to gain a greater reward, or will they choose something they prefer to gain a smaller reward.
- What affects a person’s ability to repeat musical notes?
This last
project was inspired by the famous experiments on learning:
One of
the findings was that chess masters have an amazing memory for patterns on the
chess board – able to recall the positions of all the pieces after only a brief
glance. Follow-up work showed that they only have this ability if the patterns
conform to possible positions in a legal game of chess. When pieces are
positioned on the board randomly, however, chess grandmasters have as poor
memories as anyone else.
What will
the outcomes be? Come to visit us on the 20th of April for the Science Fair day
when the students will present their experiments to everyone in the school and
visitors.
