Testing a hypothesis by Derwent Water

If you've seen the new Star Wars film, you might recognise Derwent Water, which was in about 30 minutes of the film. We're expecting crowds later in the year, but there weren't many people around today. The new sign boards had a testable statement: that it would take 2 minutes to walk to the lake. If you can test that prediction, then we could call it an hypothesis. So I did time it. I'm not a slow walker but it took me nearly 3 minutes. Is the hypothesis correct? Well, we'd need to test it on many more people and on many more occasions. One piece of data is a start but more is needed. I could do repeat readings myself. They won't all be the same although they should be similar. These small variations would be called RANDOM ERROR. It is important to have control variables in any test to make it fair. So the same person would be a start because a person with longer legs might get there in less time because each stride takes them further. If we then found that it worked with different people, we could say that the test was REPRODUCIBLE because different people had done it and got the same pattern. These are some of the scientific investigation words we've been learning this week. And sadly no sign of Princess Leia today... :(