First Day Summary & Photo

*During our first meeting of BES 301 we undertook a basic overview of the course syllabus, along with participating in three different group activities designed to give us some introductory experience with the tenants of the scientific method and other scientific practices.  For our first group activity we were given some items, then asked to make basic observations about these objects, followed by making some conclusions about the owner of these objects, based on our observations.  For example my group received a bottle of glass cleaner for our first object.  We observed this bottle was partially used and had "not for use on contacts" written on it.  Therefore we concluded that this bottle was designed to clean some type of eye ware, and due to it appearing to be used quite frequently, we concluded that this form of eye wear must be pretty important to the owner and worn quite frequently.  Therefore we concluded the owner probably wore vision enhancing eyeglasses, not just sunglasses which are often maintained far less seriously.  Based on this first activity we then established as a class, with the professors' guidance, that we were making scientific observations and conclusions in this activity, which are often based on such premises as previous experiences and probability observations.
*** NOTE: It is important when doing science to know probability observations could be wrong, therefore this is just a starting off point for doing science, i.e. observations don't equal a theory. ***
 *For our second group activity each group was asked to represent a certain portion of our syllabus in a clear and concise image.  The group I was in decided to draw a calender that had a snow theme on it and a copyright notice on the bottom to represent the following three aspects included in our assigned portion of the syllabus. The calender itself represented the aspect of good time management for success, the snow theme of the calender represented the aspect of the rules on inclement weather, and the copyright notice at the bottom of our calender represented the importance of not plagiarising in our work for BES 301.
*In our third group activity we were asked to guess what was hidden under a piece of tape on a six sided cube with numbers on each uncovered side.  We then made observations based on our previous experiences, recognizing a pattern, and using deductive reasoning to conclude that a numerical 2 was hidden under that tape.  We made this conclusion because we observed that there were six sides, and that a 1,3,4,5,6 could be seen separated evenly amongst the 5 remaining uncovered sides. So we then concluded that the missing 2 in this sequenced pattern was the most probable thing to be under the tape on the covered side.  After this third exercise, we then discussed as a class, with the instructors guidance, how each of the patterns on this cube pertained to specific terms used in interpreting and analyzing statistical data.  ****