S103: Potatoes have feelings too.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, find out the water content by percentage weight of your average potato. This is a block one experiment.

Preparation

After some time spent reading through the book, it was interesting to have a break and start some practical skills. Lets see, by heating the potato in the microwave, we can drive off all the water held in its cells, and see how much of it there is.

Now - what equipment do we need.

• A microwave - check!
• A potato or two - check (Maris Piper, unpeeled, 3).
• A calculator - check
• Scales - check (digital ones, weighing in 5g increments - wooooh!)
• Notebook - check
• 5 year old helper - hmm, not mentioned in the notes.

Method

First job, find a suitable plate. I decide I want a lightweight one so that it won't affect the scales too much. If the plate weighed 10 kg, the scales probably wouldn't be very sensitive to a few grams change in weight.

Now - slice up the potato, and already my helpers attention had started to wander. I wanted to slice them thin for speed, but decided I just needed to get on with it while the attention was focused on him trying to switch on the calculator.

Right - so into the nuke and blast for the first 4 mins. Out it comes, and its a little warm. We measure the weight, and I write down my first figures. I return the potatoes to the oven, while my helper tries to weigh his hand.
After a little bit of dissuasion, he's back on the calculator, now having got it switched on. So I ask him to type in the numbers whilst doing the arithmetic in my head as a double check. We have a few false starts...

By now the next 4 mins is up, so I do another weighing. I hear the calculator clatter to the floor.
Anyway, another weight recorded, and back to the oven. I turn around, and there he is is, trying to weigh his head this time, and read the numbers at the same time.

We do some more calculator work, and then he wants to know why crocodiles and caimans don't both live in the amazon.

The microwave peeps, and the calculator clatters to the floor. Another measurement, and my helper is getting quite good at subtraction. I manage to persuade him that weighing other parts of his body is really not worth it.

The next record and the calculations are definitely wrong, where we'd been subtracting 55g, he now wants to see just how many 5's he can get on the display. I think I've just found a new source of errors...

We're down to two minutes between bursts now, and there is barely time to drop the calculator and recover it between the measurements, but he rises to the challenge majestically.

The potatoes are now looking distinctly crisp shaped, and are very hot when trying to separate them.

Another couple of blasts, and there is no change in measurement, so I pronounce it done. The calculator clatters to the floor one last time in celebration.

Results

A bit of calculation, and I come up with a figure of very slightly over 80% for the water content.

I reflect upon the geniuses whose shoulders I am standing on, Newton, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein. I wonder if they'd have seen further with a little helper?

Previous S103 Next S103

Starting S103

So september comes around, and with it a large pack of books, papers, CD's and DVDs. Included was

• Three text books
• A pair of DVD programmes
• A pair of DVD course materials
• A set of course notes
• A set of course guides
• A stop press notice
• A glossary
• A folder
• A bit of black plastic
• Various introductory and other guides
• A checklist
• The first set of TMAs
  

I unpacked the contents on the kitchen table and tried to make sense of them. There was a lot of stuff there, and it was difficult to untangle it at first. They only send part of the course at this time, as they don't want to swamp you with information and make you run and hide.
However even with this reduced load I found it difficult to make sense of what to read first, second and so on.

They usually have a set of things, so you get a course guide - which is a one page synopsis of the chapters, and estimate of how long each part will take and what other media might be used. Then there is the course notes which have longer exercises to do for each topic. There is the course book too - which is where the main learning comes from. I usually forgot about the other two documents until prompted in the book to read various bits.

I tried going through the things in various ways, but in the end I couldn't really see which was the way to read these things. I gave up and just started reading book 1, The Water of Life which seemed to work out ok. Having done science before, the book was pretty straight forward being a nice gentle introduction to some science concepts.

Meanwhile the OU forum jumped into life. A lot of early comments about things. Tutor groups hadn't been allocated and people were getting all wrapped up in the idea of travelling hundreds of miles to tutorials. Lots of speculation on this that and the other.

It had the definite sense of we were all setting out on a journey together.

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To S103 or not to S103 - that is the question

After my time at residential school - in fact on the last morning I wondered aloud to the course director if I should take S103 or not.

On the plus side, it would be good experience working in a more long term course, TMA (tutor marked assignments) and having a tutor would all be good experience.
I had looked into the idea of credit transfer, but for that it needed certain documents to show what I already had, and although I could probably find my degree certificate within a day or two of rummaging, the details of the modules and courses I did I don't think I have any record of.

On the other hand, I ought to be able to do the course quite easily, having done a science degree and having found the other courses I'd done at level one not too hard. And then again it was like £560 pounds to do it - not the sort of sum you casually toss around on a whim.

In the end, I decided to do it. My geology and chemistry were a little weak, I wasn't sure how much biology and physics I might have forgotten, and I had a feeling that doing things the OU way would be useful.

The deciding factor was that in September, none of the level 2 courses I was interested in were running, they all started in the following February. So, I decided I'd sign up, get the 60 points on offer (hopefully). I'd also work hard to get as far ahead as I could, and if things were going well, I could sign up for a course in Feb to run parallel with the 2nd half of S103.

It seemed like a plan.

Next S103

Back from the residential school

Back from the school, and starting to recover. I have an ECA (End of Course Assessment) in my hand, that needs to be completed with about a month.
The advice at the school was to do this as soon as you can, as a lot of the questions focus on the practical work you did, and your memory for the details fades quickly.

I had to write up one of the physics experiments and draw graphs, do some analysis of ecology data and a few other things. It wasn't that hard, but did take a day or two to get it all down.

With the ECA posted, we just had to sit back and wait. It takes a long time for it to be marked. I did the school in mid July, and got the result a few days before Christmas. By that time I couldn't remember much about it or where I might have gone wrong. I scored 77% for this one, which I was vaguely annoyed about. I thought I'd done better than that, and the feedback was of the general nature across all answers "Students answer this question well on the whole, those that failed ..."

Anyway, I decided by this time to just write it off, although I heard from one or two of my fellow students that they too were surprised at the level of the mark.

Onwards...

Off to residential school

While working on my planets and fossils courses, the residential school material arrived.
I finished and submitted the planets/fossils so had plenty of time to read through the preparatory material, and get a copy of the good sciences guide to read too.

I found this second book very boring to read - partly because you shouldn't read it as a book, but use it to help you with specific topics. I also knew a fair bit about it.

I did worry before hand if I could tackle SXR103 without doing the main course, S103, but in the end decided my previous science experience would carry me through. The course was advertised as a standalone one, but it seems to have been a fairly recent change (last few years) so I wondered if it was just for the purposes of advertising.

I'm not going to write up my experiences, as I've already done so else where.
See the informal account and the more formal account I modified so the OU could use it directly.

The Planets

I've always had an interest in planets, and this course seemed like an ideal opportunity to explore this more. I mean, I knew what they were all called, and where they were more or less, I'd even seen Partick Moore talk about them live.

It came with

• A course book
• A Teach Yourself Planets book (always referred to as TYP).
• A CD with images and facts on
• A couple of Computer Marked Assignments.

The course looks at each of the 9 (as there were when I started it, but not by the end!) planets, and other solar system objects in detail, and a final chapter on planets around other systems.

Besides the basic facts or orbits and moons, there is a fair bit about the geology of each planet, or at least as much as is known.

The multi choice CMA at the end is harder than it sounds. Some of the questions it is quite hard to argue for which ones are right. I found one of them seemed to hinge on exactly what a planetary body was - the course books themselves have 3 different definitions.

Anyway, another 10 points accumulated.