What to do when your experiment fails

Sometimes our science lessons do not go as expected. We followed the instructions, and the “proven” scientific chemistry fact didn’t happen, or maybe you were just demonstrating how a certain aspect of biology works. Let’s look at what to do when your science experiment fails.

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Quick note from Future Ticia 2023

I’m updating this, and at the time I had been running a science linkie, do you remember linkies? I’d taken a break for a month or two from hosting, so if you read a reference to that, that’s what’s going on.

Now back to past Ticia 2014.

I have to admit part of why we haven’t been (hosting Science Sunday) is because our science experiments and demonstrations have been failing.  More often than I really care to admit.  So today let’s talk about what to do when your experiment fails.

Because there are times when your experiment turns out like this:

First, look at why the experiment failed

Here are some questions to look at when you’re looking at why your experiment failed:

1. Did you have the right equipment?
2. Did you follow the procedure?
3. Did you measure correctly?
4. Did you put it in the right place?

We attempted to build a model of the lungs, and gathered all the materials we were told to, and then built it, but it didn’t work.  The 2-liter jug kept collapsing under the pressure of the balloon.

Next, what can you change?

Once you think you know why, can you change the reason it changed?

We tried an experiment to see how the mucus in our nose collects debris and keeps it from getting into our lungs.  At the end of several days sitting on my counter, all we had proved is the water side dried and became wavy, and the honey was sticky but had gathered nothing.

I think if we repeated this experiment I would try sprinkling dirt on the paper and demonstrating the honey catches it and keeps it from going anywhere, while the water side does nothing.

Repeat your experiment with the changes

If you have the time AND ABILITY to enact the changes, try the experiment again.

We tried the lung model using several different bottle variations, but nothing worked, sometimes you just can’t get something to work.

I had a hangout on air and sent the kids upstairs with instructions to try different exercises and record how many times they breathed.  They came back with results anywhere from 2 to 500.  They obviously failed to measure correctly and to follow procedures.

We repeated it with me showing them how to measure it and got much more reliable results.

If you keep at it, and keep trying after your experiment has failed, then you can get the joy of seeing your experiment work:

And sometimes it still will not work

And that is okay. It is okay if you try and try and just say, “I wash my hands of this and walk away.” You do not have to do every science demonstration or experiment. While continuing to try until you succeed can be a great way to show perseverance to your kids, but sometimes it can also be good to show our kids when to cut your losses.

I keep showing this image because we tried so many different ways to get this project to work, and none did. I read how other people succeeded, I tried all those different bottles, I tried different ways to keep the balloon in place or other items, but it didn’t work. Finally we walked away from the project.

And that’s okay.