Thinking+Flexibly

Thinking Flexibly
When beginning our first group project, Lynette, Sam, Tait, and I had trouble thinking of what to experiment on. After brainstorming, we came up with the ideas of coke and mentos, pop rocks, baking soda and vinegar, the pH differences of mineral and distilled water, and the level of estrogen in different waters. All of these ideas were however, overly ambitious or lacking in real result.

Finally, we decided to experiment on the reactions of coke and mentos, pop rocks and coke, and baking soda and vinegar, and to determine which out of the three would produce the most gas. We were fortunately set back on track when told that experimenting on three different reactions would have a complicated result that lacked a relationship. With that we considered experimenting only on pop rocks and coke, and then only baking soda and vinegar, and settled on only coke and mentos. This didn't last long when we realized that the reaction of coke and mentos is unexplainable to scientists, and that we were reaching too high. In the end, we went from experimenting with food to experimenting with pennies.

From coke and mentos, we decided to do an experiment that would change copper pennies to silver, and then to gold. This experiment would yield better results that could be documented mathematically in a graph. After reflecting my group's journey of decisions, I realize that we could be easily portrayed as being indecisive. This indecisiveness, however, is nothing more than our willingness to achieve adequate results, and without the ability to think flexibly we would have been stuck on the idea of experimenting on food. Thinking flexibly was important in this situation as it would be in others because it allows one to have an open mind and attitude towards anything.