Challenge 5

Today was all about the question, "what is a testable question". The kids are doing a virtual science fair, and they need to develop a question and experiment to answer it, so we talked about what a testable question was.

The students, I found, mostly answered the question with tautologies, "a testable question is a question that is testable", etc. I feel like we could have added the caveat that they couldn't use the word testable in the definition, and it may have forced them to explain what it meant a little. It may also have caused them not to answer, though, as they often shy away from anything too challenging, and that's a shame.

I was happy to see that a few kids actually did their best to explain what testable actually meant, though, without being prompted. I wonder how one is supposed to get more of them to that point. I think, if we start by letting them answer it the easy way, and then ask them to double down on it by getting them to elaborate on the meaning of the word testable, at a later time, then we could accomplish that.

The other big question that dominated the day was, "what fruit or vegetable do you like the most?". Silly question, but my CT likes to spend a little time every day talking about frivolous/fun things to try and increase engagement. Today it was vegetables and fruit; they talked about their favorites and tried to guess the names of rare ones.

A lot of kids like Dragon Fruit, apparently; I've literally never even seen one. One thing I will note is that the engagement with the fun activity was only slightly higher than the engagement with the academic one. It doesn't feel to me like the class chose not to answer the testable-question question because it was less fun, they must have genuinely not known the answer if they didn't.