These Human Body experiment lessons should be used with lessons about the scientific method (especially if your school does a science fair). Each experiment in the series will identify the following topics:

• Question

• Hypothesis

• Materials

• Experiment

  o Procedure

  o Control, independent, and dependent variable

• Results

• Conclusion

When explaining an experiment to the students, refer back to the scientific method. This will help the students understand these concepts in an applied setting. Hopefully, this will help their experiment idea generation, or at the very least, help them correctly identify their controls and variables within an already established experiment. Another option for the human body experiment series is to teach these lessons as the students learn about the human body, specifically as a follow-up to the Great River Lesson.

In this human body experiment, the students will investigate whether exercise can boost their math abilities. This lesson works well when taught in conjunction with the Scientific Method and science fair. This lesson may also effectively show that exercise has a brain-boosting component, which may be an incentive to exercise (especially for those who don’t like it). Finally, it may also demonstrate that play may be equivalent to exercise in brain-boosting power.

Materials: 

·      An ample space (gym or field)

·      Equipment for your classroom’s favorite sport (soccer, football, etc.)

·      Two math fact sheets per student. Each set should be the same topic but not identical. For example, if a student works on multiplication tables with two and three, both sheets have the same math facts but not in the same order.

o   This can be used as a discussion piece after the experiment. If the math facts sheets were identical, their improvement might be due to exposure and memory, not exercise. These sheets should have at least one hundred problems, and it should be a challenge. If the students can quickly finish the sheet during the control, there won’t be any measurable change.

·      Pencils with erasers

Minimum Amount of Students:

This experiment could be done with just one person. However, to get better data, we want to compare our results with others to get a good sense of what is happening. For example, with only one person, we might learn how one person’s math-taking ability is affected by exercise. Still, we could learn if exercise improves math test-taking ability in many subjects.

Age: Upper elementary and middle school