I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
All the time. It isn’t science if it works perfectly all the time. Lab work is especially finicky. Sometimes the only thing you can do is go home and have a nap…because nothing is going to work that day. 🙂
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Yep, stuff goes wrong all the time. It’s rarely a disaster, but more often like “well, that’s not how i thought that would work!”
And sometimes, you learn a whole lot more from the things that don’t work, than from the things that do!
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ALL THE TIME!
It’s one of the things that you must learn to expect in a way. In science, you need to be sure that your findings are reproducible, meaning that they are correct/true. However it can get very frustrating getting a different result when you repeat things using the same equipment and parameters as you did before. But the fact of the matter is that something has changed from when you did this task the last time. To use an analogy, if you try and kick/roll a round ball outside in a straight line, how many times will it go straight, and how many times will it go to the side? It could have hit a stone, or there was suddenly a gust of wind.
Hannah is right when she said getting something wrong can in fact teach you something you didn’t expect. Serendipitous discoveries are often where the major breakthroughs come from. Would love to have that kind of luck myself 😛
P.S. Just on a different note, my computers hard-drive disc died earlier this year whilst I was in the process of backing up data/results. Now if that’s not something going wrong, I don’t know what is! lol
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Things do go wrong. I have dropped an experiment right before I was going to get the result. That was a very frustrating mistake!
Sometimes things going wrong can actually be revolutionary. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because he was particularly sloppy with his lab technique. He was growing dangerous bacteria on an agar plate to see if he could find a medicine to kill it. When our great grand parents were children, this bacteria used to give people a nasty infection that often resulted in death. Alexander accidentally got mould growing on an agar plate and noticed, to his surprise that it had killed the bacteria. The mould was Penicillium! Thanks to Alexander’s accident we can now all have penicillin in a tablet when we are sick. Now that’s a wonderful mistake to make.
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As the others have said- things can go wrong in studies all the time. It helps you to solve problems better in the future and develops your creative skills.
The important thing to remember is that it’s all part of the learning process and there isn’t anything wrong with it – in fact some discoveries have been made because something has gone wrong to begin with but has created a new and different question that needs to be answered!
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