intro continued

After the methods were created by each student, they were randomly assigned to another classmate by Professor Brewer. Each student was asked to follow the new methods written by the classmate and create a figure of the spider web that they found. This part of the experiment resembled replication, as the students were tasked with redo the experiment to ultimately judge how concise and helpful the classmates method’s were. The students then observed the two figures of the same spider web and identified the differences between them.

The purpose of this experiment was to practice scientific writing through drafting the experimental methods and formatting figures. There were many factors identified that needed to be controlled in order to replicate the figures correctly. Some factors identified in the experiment included the exposure to sunlight, time of day, and weather. These affected the picture quality and color. The distance from the spiderweb and the camera angles were also factors that needed to be accounted for. These scaling factor was controlled by using some type of apparatus to measure the spiderweb in the picture.