As a student in the Writing in Biology class at University of Massachusetts Amherst in Fall 2018, I conducted a project to practice scientific writing and replication. In this project, students find a spider web on campus and create a multi-panel figure illustrating the location of the spider web on campus. Students then create methods explaining how the student found the spider web. These methods also describe the steps taken to format the photographs into a multi-panel figure. Upon completing the original methods, a different classmate follows another student’s methods and replicates the multi-panel figure based on those instructions. The students then observe the differences between the original and replicated multi-panel figure, and use factors to infer why the differences are present. This possible differences between the two figures include differences in the size of the objects in the photo, lighting, or cropping of the image. The factors that could have affected the creation of the multi-panel figure included the time of day, sunlight, weather, or discrepancies in the methods. Overall, the purpose of this project is to practice writing concise and descriptive methods for an experiment, as well as provide practice for portraying differences between the two multi-panel figure.
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