These Human Body experiment lessons should be used with lessons about the scientific method (especially if your school does a science fair). Each experiment in the series will identify the following topics:

• Question

• Hypothesis

• Materials

• Experiment

  o Procedure

  o Control, independent, and dependent variable

• Results

• Conclusion

When explaining an experiment to the students, refer back to the scientific method. This will help the students understand these concepts in an applied setting. Hopefully, this will also help in their experiment idea generation or help them correctly identify their controls and variables within an already established experiment. Another option for the human body experiment series is to teach these lessons as the students learn about the human body, specifically as a follow-up to the Great River Lesson.

In this experiment, the students are looking at their power output, calculated by looking at the peak work they can do through a vertical jump test. The students may have a hypothesis on who they believe is very powerful. Still, they may be surprised as the students measure their abilities.

Materials: 

·      A tape measurer

·      A calculator (optional)

Minimum Amount of Students:

This experiment could be done with just one person. However, to get better data, we want to compare our results with others to get a good sense of what is happening. It will be far more interesting to compare power output between classmates, especially if there are some surprises.

Age: Upper Elementary and Middle School