Questioning+and+Posing+Problems

__Questioning and Posing Problems__
//As the Habits of Mind defines it, "Questions vary in complexity; you should be able to use questions as a strategy to search and find solutions, and pose problems in science that can be solved experimentally."//

As I found out during our Video project, asking a question is not so straightforward. Our group, Isabelle, William, and I, wanted to **test the effectiveness of different carbonated sodas in cleaning rust off iron.** Easy right? Not really. When we first thought up of this idea, I believed we would just gather a handful of rusty nails, throw them into different drinks, and everything will somehow work out. **The question turned out to require much more work than I expected.**

Then came the actual logistics of throwing these nails into drinks. Where will we get rust? It doesn't appear when and where we want it, and even then, how would we control for the amount of rust present on the nail, or even quantitatively measure how much the soda managed to clean? How long will we leave the nails in the soda? Where will we even get the sodas, let along how much should we use and how we will compare the data afterward.

This didn't come to me all at once, of course. At first, it was just a trickle of uncertainty in some areas, such as how we would get rust on the nails. I went to Mr Happer's room to pick up a small nail and placed it in a water-filled beaker as a preliminary test - and found that it was quite difficult to rust nails consistently and in the way we wanted them to.

But what really started the questioning was when our teacher asked us to print a procedures page and read it over, looking for even the tiniest of details that could change the experiment. I thought we did a decent job typing up the experiment, but when I really read through it all, I started questioning almost every procedure. However, these questions did not go to waste. Our group managed to get together and solve each question one by one, to make the experiment better and more plausible. We used these questions **to improve our experiment by finding solutions to these problems**, and consequently, our actual experiment went by with little to no faults. We knew what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

A sample of the problems we asked and how we solved them:
 * **Where do we get the rust?**
 * Our teacher kindly directed us to a bag of iron in storage that had long since rusted away - much cleaner and easier than trying to rust iron ourselves
 * **How do we measure the amount of rust on a piece of iron, and how do we keep the amount of rust consistent?**
 * We realized that we couldn't perfectly control for the amount of rust on a piece of iron, so we decided to measure before/after changes, ccause and effect basically. This allows for a balanced comparison of the cleaning value of soda even on pieces of iron with different sizes, as we are measuring percent change in rust mass, before and after.
 * **How do we get the sodas, and how long do we leave the iron in it?**
 * Isabelle noted that she had a convenience store close to her place, once that stocked an enormous variety of sodas. And while the length of soaking time was a bit more arbitrary, we decided that a few days should be more than enough - and so settled with a time period of greatest convenience for us, the 2 days between each class meeting.

Even with the experiment done, there are still more questions to be answered. Measuring and evaluating the data, is, of course, essential, and the categories we place the data into can change depending on whether we are trying to test brand type, flavour type, acidity levels, etc. In the end, asking questions is not something only the teacher does - it's something I should do consistently throughout the course solve problems, even if its a roundabout way.

