Distance or Time?

I'm hoping to do my experiment before the holidays end. It should take no longer than a day if I can get all 15 males and females over (most likely church friends). I'll also need to get all the teenagers (anyone under 18) to get their parents to write me a note saying that they are allowed to take part in the experiment, or I could write one up and have them sign it. For now i'm going to do some more research on reflex actions and the ruler drop

This experiment is based on the subjects' reaction time, so is this one but it also has a reaction time table to convert your measurement in cm to a reaction time in seconds. This website has a formula that I can use to convert the distance on the ruler to a reaction time. So now i'm thinking that maybe I can use time as one of my variables, hopefully this formula is accurate. What do you think Ms Zhang?

My Experiment

Aim: To find out which gender has faster reflex actions

Hypothesis: Males have faster reflex actions than females

Independent Variable: Gender

Dependent Variable: Length (cm)

The experiment will be repeated three times for each test subject and there will be 15 males and 15 females.

I want to make sure this is a legit experiment before I go ahead and do it and that both my variables are right in relation to the experiment, so if you could let me know once you've seen this Ms Zhang. Thankyou!

the ruler drop

Ms Zhang was telling me to have a look at facial reflex actions but i'm not quite sure how I would test that. So far I'm just thinking that the ruler drop test would be my best bet. And since it's a quick experiment I don't think it would be smart to have 'time' as one of the variables, I thought 'distance (cm)' would be better. As in, how many cm have passed before the subject has grabbed the ruler

Accuracy

So the other day I got thinking, "what if all my test subjects
were the same age for the gender experiment?" I'm guessing it will make the
results more accurate but it'll also be harder to do, what do you think?
Should I go find 15 males and females aged 15/16 or just leave it how it was?

Scientfic Sarah Signing Off

but WHAT is a reflex action?

A reflex action is a stereotyped (involuntary) motor responseelicited by a defined stimulus.

Unfortunately I only understood parts of that definition but not all of it as a whole so I prefer to go with this one, 'A reflex action is an involuntary reaction caused by a stimilus' for eg. blinking when
someone claps infront of your face or moving your hand away when you touch something very hot or cold.

As i've decided that my SRP will be based on reflex actions I thought it would be best to decide what exactly I'm going to base my experiments on, lately i've been tossing up between age and gender but then I thought "wouldn't testing it on both make it even more accurate?" Then I could narrow it down to what age group and which gender has the fastest reflex actions. So there's my aim:

"To find out which age group and gender has the fastest reflex actions"

Another question though Ms Zhang, does that mean I need 30 separate groups of people for each experiment? Or can I use the same people and get it over and done with all at once?

Scientific Sarah Signing Off

a thankyou to older sisters

Thanks to my sisters' handy input I am now re-thinking how I'm going to go about doing my experiment. I'm considering testing reflex actions on the basis of age instead of gender or possibly even doing both. I also have to find various other ways of testing it so that I can come to a more accurate conclusion. I'm getting really excited about this, my creative juices are flowing!

Scientific Sarah Signing Off

progress!

I'm very happy to announce that I started my research a while ago and I was lucky enough to find some information related to my topic. For my SRP i've been wanting to focus on reflex actions between males and females. I'm hoping to test this out on 15 males and 15 females ranging from 14-25 by using tests such as the ruler drop. This will involve me dropping a 30cm ruler from above the subjects' hand and measuring how many cm have passed before they catch it. I'm also hoping to find a few more ways of testing this but so far this is the only website I can find that has helped me in any way. Do you think the site looks ok Ms Zhang?

I'm going to try and update as often as I can in order to get this SRP started.

P.S. I also wanted to try the experiment where you hit the subjects' knee and see if it moves/reacts but i'm not sure if that will help me with my topic, thoughts?

Scientific Sarah Signing Off