Possible Ideas of Physics Investigative Project (1st Edit on 1 June 2014)

I love food and cooking and I love Physics.  I have always wanted to marry the two of them together.  Recently, I have been doing this very wonderful course online in Edx on Food Sciences, and this has brought some inspiration for me to perhaps do this as part of my Physics Investigative Project for my next batch of year 1 students in GATE.

At the school at I teach, we encourage teachers to go beyond the daily formative pen and paper assessments or the termly summative assessments.  To encourage all departments and students to do alternative forms of assessments, each subject will need to have some alternative forms of assessments for students.

For Physics, the tutors all agree that there should be more focus on investigative work that is done by the students and in the meanwhile they can be taught (hm....perhaps not taught....because we don't explicitly teach) scientific reasoning.  We also want the students to get down to planning and doing experiments that are not so "cookbook" style as real investigations are never like that.  Projects are also done in groups to allow students opportunities to work in teams to hone their teamwork skill....hm....though they often hate this part.

Anyway.....back to the story, although we have similar goals in mind, we can never completely agree on what projects are to be done and how they are to carried out.  But for my GATE class because there is only one class and I often take them on their own, I can essentially carry out the projects with great flexibility.

Okay....going further back up, let me not lose track, cause I can be a little long winded at times.....what is this post for?  I have some ideas that I hope to implement for PIP as I am going through my Edx course with Harvard.  So I decided to record them here and so I won't forget.  For those of you who are interested,  feel free to pick up on these ideas or if you think you have something even better, please leave comments.

Project 1 :  Cooking the Perfect Egg
1.  Literature Review : The Science of Cooking an Egg.
2.  Students to investigate the specific heat capacity of an egg.
3.  At the end of the project, they will be given hot water and 4 eggs and they will have cook a perfect soft boil egg (Singapore Breakfast style)
4.They need to explain using sound scientific principles how they are able to attain it.  They have to come up with a general scientific equation on their method such that the equation can allow for cooking of a varying no. of eggs up to 10 eggs and test you their scientific equation).