Does stretching before sport improve performance?

There are many possibilities for IA titles that investigate a focused aspect of physical performance. These studies can often be completed alone, or using simple assistance to measure or record some performance. Examples include, jumping, throwing, and sprinting. There are many types of stretching exercise, including dynamic and static. The difficulty is to make the methodology consistent with the research question and to be specific about muscle groups used and ensure that these same groups of muscles are the ones being stretched.

What effect does a certain factor have on hearing?

Young people and less young people spending more and more time listening to music or podcasts using headphones. The WHO has produced a website dedicated to safe listening which could provide ideas for investigations.There are some excellent hearing testing apps for smart phones in all the stores, and Mynoise.net gives some excellent information about hearing tests online.  The https://hearingtest.online/ explains clearly about hearing tests and provides a nice simple calibrated test which could be used in an IA.  The Audiocheck website is designed to test hi-fi equipment as well as your ears but it has some nice features for producing single pitch tones and a very fast test to sweep across the audio range to test hearing.

What can I do with my sports / fitness watch?

Starting with a piece of useful apparatus that would be good to use for an IA can be a way to find a good IA research question.  Modern fitness watches can give data about sleep, heart rate, estimates of breathing rates, data to help control variables during exercise, like pace, or sometimes even power. There are a whole host of possibilities for research questions. Does the heart rate change in different body positions? Monitoring heart rate after eating food, or drinking. How does body position affect recovery rates after exercise.

Composting kitchen waste

There are many factors which affect the rate of decomposition of organic material. Food composting is a good way to reduce the volume of kitchen waste which goes into landfill, and it can provide useful compost for the garden. Some factors which could be investigated are, the addition of dry leaves or soil, the temperature or humidity of the compost bin. The rate of composting can be measured in several ways, the physical changes in the appearance of the food waste, the production of carbon dioxide, which is a sign of the rate of metabolism of decomposer organisms.  Good hygiene can be included in the safety and disposal section of the exploration, as well as consideration of the risk of unknown organisms growing in the compost.  It would be best to avoid looking at the composting of animal waste, like cat litter or horse manure, as these have a higher risk of pathogenic organisms growing.

Phototropism and light intensity

The photo at the top of the page shows three different sets of seedlings growing from seeds bought for adding to salads. While we know that a lack of light causes the seedlings to grow tall and yellow and that light from one side causes phototropism but there are other factors which could be investigated, e.g. light intensity, wavelength of light, temperature, whether seed leave covered by the seed coat do as much phototropism as those with two seed leaves uncovered, the effect of removing a single seed leaf.

The effect of osmosis on cell structures.

Osmosis in samples of cells is easy to control and everyone knows that the mass or the length of a potato cylinder will increase in pure water and decrease in salt solutions. Guard cells in a leaf epidermis will change shape and close stomata if they lose water by osmosis and dandelion stalks will curl in different solutions too. What happens inside of plant cells in the case of osmosis is less well studied?  The plasma membrane of cells will become plasmolysed and is visible in red onion epidermis, but what effect does osmosis have on the shape and size of chloroplasts, amyloplasts in potato cells or the nucleus of cells?  For students with access to a microscope and a sample of cells, moss leaves, pond weed, thin slices of potato or leaf epidermis this could make an interesting IA topic.  There are many options for original research questions that we don't know the answer to in advance.

Covid19 lock-downs in 2020 and 2021 have forced many students to work on their IA's outside the lab. This has promoted creativity and problem solving. Students may have tried to use databases as sources of data for studies looking to find correlations between variables. Here are some examples of huge databases which students may find useful.

cBioPortal  - a giant database of genomic and clinical data used in cancer research.

Seer Cancer Database (USA)

Global cancer observatory (WHO / OMS)

Cancer today (WHO)

Florida Keys Bleachwatch coral reef data collected by divers and automatic sensors.

NOAA Onestop - a great place to search for climate, ocean or fisheries data.

There are many examples of experiment simulations that can be found and used for the IA. Some of these are not suitable but many others are.  There is a good method to test the suitability using this questionnaire (IA simulation google form from workshop)

Here are some good sources:

• Netlogo Bug Hunt Speeds - This simulation of a bird eating bugs could be used to evaluate the effectiveness of different bug behaviour, including fleeing and speed of movement, on survival of bugs, or the success of the predator.
• Netlogo flocking model - investigate how simple rules of behaviour can lead to animals like birds or fish forming flocks.
• Jon Darkow Lactase Enzyme simulation - investigate one of three factors which affect rate of glucose production.
• JonDarkow Cellular respiration accounting model - Investigate how reactant concentrations or temperature influence the rate of respiration
• Netlogo Blood Sugar model - Investigate glucose regulation by the production of insulin and glucagon.
• NetLogo Membrane Formation model. Explore how simple attractive and repulsive forces lead to the formation of phospholipid bilayers in water.
• NetLogo Slime model - Experiment with aggregation behaviour in slime-mould cells, and how pheromones can lead to collective behaviour.
• Netlogo bacterial antibiotic resistance model - Change the antibiotic dose size and regularity and see what effects this has on bacteria with different permeability of their membranes in two patients. (There was an error appearing when I clicked "manual dose", on the day I tried this model, but otherwise it worked fine.)
• NetLogo Peppered Moths model. - Investigate how the level of pollution, the intensity of natural selection or the mutation rate affect the colour forms in a population of the legendary peppered moth.