Thinking+Flexibly


 * When approaching the scientific field one must be capable of thinking flexibly, and solving problems, or obstacles that may occur. The ability to think flexibly may be the difference between a succesful study and a failed study. Every study or experiment is prone to problems or complications, and to get around these complications, the scientist, or person running the study must be able to think flexibly. They must be able to change their minds or the points of view as they receive additional information. **


 * October 11, 2010 **


 * When planning our scientific lab report for a digital story, my group and I (me, wendy, and michael) had to demonstrate flexiblity in our thinking. Our procedure and plans for our lab had to be edited many times as we ran into problems and gained more information. Our material list also had to be edited, because we changed what things we were testing for in the water samples we would take. At first, my group and I planned to simply test for biological presence using simple yes/no testing kits (for bacteria). However, this testing would not provide solid quantitative results that we could attempt to compare to the pH to investigate a correlation. So, we decided to test for dissolved CO2 and Dissolved oxygen levels, because high levels of these gases dissolved in our water samples would indicate biological presence (animal/plant). Unfortunately, the dissolved oxygen testing kit required a large amount of time to learn how to use and set up; time that would not be available to us. Therefore, we yet again had to think flexibly and change our plans. We decided to elminate the testing of dissolved oxygen from our lab. Everytime we changed what we woudl test for, we had to change our material list as well. In order to overcome the problems we faced in the our labs procedure, my group members and I had to think flexibly and be open to new ideas. We had been given information about potential problems, and thought flexibly about how to solve them. **



**my group and I had to change our plans multiple times, as seen in the image above taken of our procedure planning sheet. Wiithout thinking flexibly, we would not have been a to come up with a succesful plan/procedure. **