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 also help in their experiment idea generation or 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.

This experiment measures heart rate and temperature and how it responds to different exercise modes. The students will learn how to find and measure their heart rate and analyze how it responds to different exercise modes. Suppose you have an infrared thermometer (leftover from Covid). In that case, you can also easily use these to monitor changes in body temperature.

Materials: 

·      Ample open space for running sprints

·      Some orange cones

·      Hula hoops (optional)

·      Jump rope (optional)

·      Mats for the ground or gym surface (optional)

·      Infrared thermometers (optional)

Minimum Amount of Students:

This series of experiments 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. Suppose we only experiment with only one person. In that case, we are learning about one individual’s response to the exercise stimulus. To know how exercise affects heart rate, we need more participants. 

Age: Upper elementary and middle school