Scientific Method

SCI 230

The Scientific Method

I chose to use the car example in the Scientific Method activity. The first step was observation. The situation being you go to leave for work in the morning and the car will not start. Next you must question why the car will not start. You can gather several hypothesis (educated guesses), and you then must choose which one to start with. I choose to follow the path of something being wrong with the car battery. I choose this because in my personal opinion it was the most likely. Each hypothesis will have a prediction that goes with it. In this case I predicted that if I charged the battery, the car would start. The last step is the conclusion. The conclusion in this example was that the car did not start. So a dead battery was not the problem. Now you must go back and pick something else and go through each of the steps again. I finally got a conclusion of the car starting because of electrical issues.

I believe that people use the Scientific Method all the time in everyday life - probably without even thinking about it. When I was a technician at DISH Network, I used this process every day to troubleshoot issues. I would have to show up at the customer’s house and then they would tell me about the issue that they were experiencing. Then I would have to narrow it down to the things that it could be so that if I altered it, their issue would be solved. Then I would start going through each of them one by one until the issue was fixed. After working at that job for so long, maybe I automatically do this with everything. But the same steps even go through my mind down to the simplest things, such as the batteries needing to be changed in a flashlight. Basically, the scientific method allows for problems or questions to be solved in a way that is organized so that every possible solution gets explored to find the best one. Obviously, solutions can be found without using the method, but with it you can be sure that you have the best...