Thinking+Flexibly

//Can you consider alternate ideas? Can you deal with more than one solution simultaneously? Is YOUR way of solving something the ONLY way? "If you never change your mind, why have one?"--De Bono//
 * Thinking Flexibly**

I have always considered myself to be a "flexible thinker" in the terms that I was open to other ideas, open to new ways of doing things, etc. However, one of my biggest weaknesses has always been altering plans that have already been made. This problem of mine surfaced, not for the first time, during the Digital Story lab report.

My group's experiment involved a mixture composed of corn starch and water, called "oobleck". Our original experimental plan was to make five different concentrations of oobleck, and then drop a coin into the oobleck and time how long it took for the coin to reach the bottom of the beaker of oobleck for each concentration. Our idea was that the data from this experiment would be able to tell us more about the properties of oobleck. Once we began the experiment, we almost immediately started running into problems. For the first few concentrations of oobleck that we made, the coin sank too fast to be timed accurately. I suggested that we continue to carry out the experiment, in hopes that we might get different results with the oobleck with a higher ratio of corn starch to water. We continued the experiment, but still couldn't get any reliable results. The oobleck was too water-like; the coin sank straight to the bottom every time. Stubbornly wanting deviate from our original procedure as little as possible, I suggested making more concentrations of oobleck, with even higher ratios of cornstarch to water. This idea of mine wasn't successful, because due to the high ratio of cornstarch to water, we couldn't even make the mixture of oobleck because there was too much cornstarch and too little water. I finally gave in, and agreed with my group that it might be best to think of something else to test with the oobleck, because the coin idea obviously wasn't working.

With a bit of help from Mrs. Knowles, our group decided to change our original procedure. Instead of doing tests involving dropping a coin into oobleck, we decided to test how long it would take various concentrations of oobleck to fill the bottom of a petri dish. We successfully carried out this experiment, and we obtained data that we could work with.

Though I was stubborn at first, I believe that by agreeing to changing our experiment idea, I was thinking flexibly. It's difficult for me to change plans once they have been made (this is one of my weaknesses), and this experiment was no exception. However, I've learned that most things don't usually go as planned, and many times, changing one's plans will yield better results than sticking with the original plan.

(These two images are from our revised experiment. We timed the amount of time it took for 20mL of different concentrations of oobleck to fill the bottom of a petri dish, and were able to obtain a lot of data that helped explain our observations and predictions)

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