Planning - Choosing a topic

Hi, my name is Adèle and I am a IB year 2 IB Biology Standard Level student at the International School of Kenya. This blog is devoted to following the progress myself and my group do while working on developing an experiment for this year's Group 4 Project. This year's theme is sport science. The other members of my group are Sarah, Eminet and Moses.

We first began discussing potential project ideas when we were assigned our groups. Sitting all in a circle, we had a quick brainstorming session where we threw ideas potential ideas. To further develop these, I set up a Facebook group with the 4 other members of my group. Here, I started posting links to articles related to sport science, to add more ideas to the mix. After a few days of mulling over possible experiments and activities we could look into, we made a list of all our ideas: 

• Anatomy
• Exercise Physiology
• Energy Systems
• Movement analysis
• Skill in sports
• Measurements and evaluations of human performance
• Nutrition for Sport and Health
• Optimizing Physiological Performance
• Psychology of Sport
• Physical activity and Health

After much discussing on Facebook, we trimmed the list down to our top three choices:• Does playing sports make you brain more effective and efficient 

• Movement analysis: Stretching and to what extent does it help 

• Energy Transfer through Balls



After much more discussing on Facebook, we agreed to choose the second choice: the impact of stretching on physical activity: "To what extent does stretching improve sporting performance?". We will be basing our experiments and hypotheses on the following websites:

http://healthland.time.com/2013/04/08/why-stretching-may-not-help-before-exercise/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22692125
https://ce.gssiweb.com/Article_Detail.aspx?articleID=736
http://jurchperformanceeducation.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Does-Stretching-Improve-Performance.pdf

Stretching is an action that many of us remember being stressed do to before, during and after we do sports. However, we found online that there is the possibility that stretching does not improve performance and may not need to be done at all. This is what we would like to prove in our project and research. Following our decision, we had another little brainstorming session on our Facebook group to discuss possible experiments we could do. I suggested that we could experiment by focusing on certain aspects of fitness: flexibility, strength, endurance. We could do certain exercises in each area of fitness, with one control who does stretching, and the variable group not stretching. This will test to see if stretching has a short term impact on physical performance. We will be focusing on Biology for this experiment. 

With this research and planning done, I thoroughly believe my group is ready to continue to the next section of the project: Action.