Our data 165 eighth graders at Cucamonga Middle School participated in Operation LifeSaver. Students were each given a LifeSaver and asked to time themselves to see how long it would take to melt the LifeSaver. Several different techniques were employed by students in melting the LifeSavers which probably accounts for the variety of times reported. It was noted that if students talked while sucking on their LifeSaver, the time period increased. For the table, the times have been averaged for each color and for each period.
All times are in minutes and seconds.
The disparity of the data led students to believe that perhaps it was technique, rather than color that made a difference in the melting times of LifeSavers. Students set out to create a new experiment that would control some of the human technique variables noted in the first experiment. This would give them greater accuracy when testing their original hypothesis . They created two different experiments based around the new hypothesis. Students tried to control the variables encountered in a number of ways, so the technique would be the same for all of the elementary students who would be doing the experiment.