V. Data Collection

• Data collection. Your data is critical to your science project and to the conclusions you will draw at the end of the project. As you gather data, be careful to accurately enter all numbers, measurements, temperatures, calculations, or other data. It is best to enter all data directly in your lab notebook. If you have data logged electronically, keep a list of log dates and file names and tape or glue printed copies into your lab notebook when possible. All trial data should be listed here besides the final set of data. The format of the data could be hand-written or digital.

• Anomalous results: There should be highlights of data that are anomalous and the experiment is repeated and corrected.

We repeated the experiment a total of 3 times, 2 of which were failed attempts as the solution melted before we started recording the data. The third time was the successful attempt.

We first recorded our data on the data loggers. Then, we saved the data into a USB flash drive. The graphs are shown in Annex B.

When looking at the graphs, we were expecting a horizontal zone for each graph which would represent the melting point. However, as shown in Annex B, only one graph from each set of data was distinctively horizontal, hence it was difficult to find the melting points. However, we were still able to find the melting points. However, some of the graphs of the data in the graphs had to be thrown away to find the melting point quicker. For example, certain parts of the graph increased and decreased continuously, so we removed some data points from the part when finding the melting point.