Science, Technology, & More

Experimental Design Guidelines

The Wind Power project offers an opportunity to design a virtual investigation of wind turbine design. The 3M/Discovery Channel is set up as an engineering challenge to power at least 400 homes. An engineer would be satisfied to reach that goal at a reasonable cost. A scientist would focus, instead, on how each factor in the design affects the overall success of the operation. Engineering work very often relies on careful scientific investigations. In the Wind Power project, you will be expected to do more than power the homes; you will be expected to design an experiment that will show how changes in specific factors change the final output of the wind turbine.

In order for this activity to demonstrate scientific reasoning, the following guidelines should be followed:

• Decide on a baseline design. Your wind turbine will probably be more successful if you do some preliminary testing in the simulation, but regardless of this testing, you must choose one design as your baseline.
• Decide on a variable to study. A scientific study focuses on one variable to study and systematically tests this variable at different levels. The more levels you have to test, the more informative your result would be.
• Keep other variables constant. If only one variable is changed, different results must be a result of changes in that one variable. If multiple variables are changed and the turbine got better, the different result could not be traced to either variable. Maybe one variable was responsible for all of the improvement, maybe each change made it a little better, or maybe one change made it better while the other made it a little worse.