General Glossary

This is an initial glossary page based on our Lab Safety, Lab Notebook and basic STEM Page. The goal of each glossary post that we put together will be to list the most likely new and important words from that post. This can help to reinforce the kids learning from the experiment or can be used to help them prepare to do the experiment.

Background – the background is information about the concept that you will be or have learned, this information can tell you about different things and knowing it can make it easier to understand what you are trying to do in the experiment

Hypothesis – if you are a fan of “Dinosaur Train” you will know this as an idea that you can test, simply put a hypothesis is an idea that you have about something and for certain things you will be able to test whether that idea is supported by your experiment or not. 

Materials – these are things that you will use in your experiment

Method – this is how you are going to or have done your experiment, you can be very detailed listing every step and every measurement that you take or you can be very simple and give a basic idea of what you did (for our younger scientists)

Observation – this is what you see, smell, hear when doing your experiment, you can write out an observation in words or you can draw a picture

Analyze – this means to look at the information that you found in your experiment and see if that information matches what you expected, what others have gotten, or has shown you something completely new

Conclusion – this is what you learned from your experiment and whether your experiment had an outcome that you expected/wanted/saw from others, it can also include what you think you could do differently or what you would like to do in further experiments

Reagents – these are materials that you mix together to get some type of reaction

Safety – this is something we always practice in the lab to make sure no one gets hurt

STEM – this is an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics