Last week I started the IA process with my first year classes. We started with an introduction to the sort of thing that makes a good investigation and the difference between an investigation and a normal lab report. This is not the first time the topic has been brought up in class though. I also showed them the assessment criteria but didn't dwell on this. So that was hour number 1 (1 hour and 20 mins actually).

Hour and twenty minutes number two was spent listening to the student proposals and there were many good ones including

• Pendulum waves
• elasticity of rubber as a function of temperature
• solar powered cars
• energy and wave amplitude
• bouncing basket balls
• holding climbing ropes at different angles
• sliding off a turntable
• focal length of lenses
• spectral glasses

I set up a Google classroom account so that I could monitor the progress of all of the students. I'm very keen for the investigation to be finished in 3 weeks, I'm hoping Google classroom will help with this. The first assignment is to fill out a proposal form as suggested by Mark Headlee on the OCC.

Description of research topic:

Reason for choice of research topic:

Identification of key variables:

Proposed research methodology and materials required:

So far so good.

For those not familiar with Google classroom it is a way of managing online assignments. Your students have to be part of the same gmail domain. Our school has a domain for all our students so this is already done. You then create a class and add your students to it. They get an email requesting them to join. Once the class is created you can send them assignments which they work on as a google doc or download - edit - upload. The thing I like about this system is that you can see what each student is doing at anytime. In this way I can pester (encourage) students who haven't done anything after each stage in the process. I haven't used this before so will be interesting to see how it works.