Cannot find resources for IA

[Guest]

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Edited November 10, 2020 by Guest
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[Slovakov]

In your IA you basically play the role of a physicist who wants to learn something about the behaviour of some physical phenomenon. So you need an independent variable, best a physical property which you set at different levels, and a dependent one, the change of which you observe when performing an experiment. You also have a set of controlled variables, which you know (or suspect) may affect the dependent variable as well, but you keep them constant. 

 

I'm not quite sure if you can do an entire IA only with data from literature, without performing any experiments (I don't really know how the IAs for current syllabus work, if someone could make it clear, it would be great) - back when I was at school this would give points in 2 out of 3 main criteria, but how it is now.... no idea.

 

In general though, what you should aim for is having some physical quantity as both your dependent and independent variable. The type of graph you proposed would be useful for an engineer, or even more for a manager on the project - it would only show which type of armor is strongest and which is weakest with no trends or patterns in between. It also doesn't give us any clue as to what may be the cause of it - there may be a few physical properties that change between various armour types, and it will be hard to conclude on which property crucial to the advantage of one over the other (there are statistical ways to do it, but you'd need a lot of data and some tools for it). 

 

So what would be easier to do is to focus on one type of armour and find a few properties that determine its strength, then put one of them as an independent, and control the rest. And although I'm saying "easier", it will be really hard to find reliable source of data to base on - armies generally like to keep their esearch in secret.

 

And if you still want to go on with this plan, a technical note: the resistance of a material to dentures and cracking is defined by its hardness and impact toughness. There are a few ways to measure each of these, so these may be your ideas for experiment.