Thinking+Flexibly

//Can you consider alternate ideas? Can you deal w////ith more than one solution simultaneously? Is your way of solving something the only way?//

In one of our self-designed experiments, we were to measure the efficiency of two fuels, ethyl and propanol by heating a can of water using a spirit burner. By calculating how much mass was expended from the fuel and how much the temperature of the water changed, we can to a certain degree estimate the amount of heat produced per gram of fuel. However, there was one vital problem...

We had done a similar experiment in the past where we burned chips as fuel to find the calorie content, and we found that the container for the water we were using, a soda can, was extremely bad at taking in heat and transferring it effectively to the water it was holding. Not only that, much of the heat was being lost to the atmosphere instead of going into the soda can. Our results for that experiment were, needless to say, not very accurate.

For this experiment, we needed to make the design more efficient and accurate - the problem was that we had think of an effective heat containing design. Isabelle and I saw some aluminum foil nearby and decided to try and design a shape that would allow the can to absorb the heat more efficiently by having less heat be lost to the atmosphere. Our first idea was to enclose the entire set, soda can, spirit burner, clamp and all under a dome of aluminum, but we found that this was too impractical and doesn't really help the problem. We thought through many other designs and eventually decided to shape the foil in a funnel shape around the soda can, focusing heat straight from the spirit burner and into the can, losing considerably less heat to the atmosphere.

We showed our flexibility in thinking through thinking up of the many designs of our experiment, going through quite a few ideas before we settled on one that worked well. Thinking flexibly was important in this case because there were so many different possible solutions, but some were better than others and we had to figure out which one was the best. This design may not be __the__ most efficient and effective design, but it made our results much more accurate so it worked well to solve our problem.