Outlines and rough drafts are important steps in any project or paper. Where would we be if we could not have a “first attempt?” We need a place to jot down our ideas, and we need to work with those ideas, organizing our ideas and refining them.

In science, we design experiments to test our ideas. Creating the experimental design is a step that must be thought through carefully. During this step, we create the experiment that will test our hypothesis, or our proposed idea. There are a few very important aspects that we must include in our experimental design setup.

Let’s say that we are going to look at how warm water affects the diffusion of dye in water. In order to examine the effects of warm water, we must have a controlled experiment. This means that we will hold constant all the parts of the experiment that could change but are not connected to the idea that we want to study. In this experiment, we must use identical glasses, the same amount of water in each class, water from the same source, same dye, same amount of dye and we must put the glasses in an identical environment. We must treat the two situations identically. Except for one variable. That is the variable we are looking at in our experiment. In this case, our experimental variable is the temperature of the water.

I find it beneficial to diagram this process. Using a web diagram like the one shown above, we can more clearly grasp the experiment. We can identify the controlled variables as well as the experimental variable. We can track what it is that we are examining, and identify what data we will collect. We have our plan!