Friday, January 20, 2012

Can you help me find a hypothesis and a independent variable?

i'm going to do this science fair project where im going to give different types of energy drinks(such as monster,red bull etc..) to people and determine which of the energy drinks worked better and how it affected the people.but i need a independent variable and hypothesis.what do you think would be a good hypothesis and independent variable?Can you help me find a hypothesis and a independent variable?
The independant variable (the thing you control) is the type of drink given.

The constants might include time of day, and quantity.

I'd have everybody record their bedtimes. Then, ask them each to drink a fixed quantity of water 1 hour before bedtime, each day for a week, and record how long it took them to settle down.

Then, next week, try drink #1 instead of water. Record when they went to sleep.

Week #3, try a different drink 1 hour before bed. Same quantity. Same time, different beverage.

Try a different beverage each week. If weeks would extend your experiment too far, choose days.

Hypothesis: Guess which beverage will keep people awake longest. The one with the most caffeine? The one with the most sugar? The one with the most ____?Can you help me find a hypothesis and a independent variable?
Simply stated, your independent variable is the type of drink. Your problem is going to be to find a hypothesis based on a measurable dependent variable (how do you measure their energy?) and control of other variable, like what they had for dinner last night, their intrinsic health condition, and so on. This is one reason (only one; there are lots of others) why scientists prefer working with cultured rats rather than real humans.



There are lots of possibilities for the dependent variable; once you've chosen it, then your hypothesis becomes something like: Energy drinks tend to increase muscle tone (dv) in humans. To do this for real you'd need some basis in statistics, which I don't assume you've had yet. You'd need to use it not just to analyze your results, but to determine how many people you need to form a sample size such that a single false result (due to some other factor, or just random error) doesn't lead you to a false conclusion. Most science fair projects are pretty limited to really objective observations, since sufficient statistics doesn't usually exist in high school curricula.Can you help me find a hypothesis and a independent variable?
The independent variable, or what factor you are changing, is the type of energy drink give to the people. The dependent variable, or what you are measuring, is the effectiveness of the energy drink. The hypothesis could be, "If a person is given an energy drink with more (some measurable ingredient based of the label on the back of the can), then the energy drink will be more effective in the energy obtained by the person.

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