A bit ago there was a brief discussion on doing the pendulum experiment. Sadly i deleted the emails so i have to reconstruct a bit. I described a design where different groups studied one variable to first determine that length was the factor with the most influence. Someone else commented that asking students to build a pendulum with a 4 sec period worked well
The latter will only work well if students understand the concept of control of variables something i think we take for granted but my not be obvious to them. The design suggested forefronts that because it comes up in the discussion of the design of the experiment.
Best
Joe
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