How flexible are your feet?

Over the past two weeks, Year Six been investigating the flexibility of their feet. 

Foot flexibility is a measurement of how much your feet change when you move and varies from person to person. It is controlled by lots of things, such as how old you are and what sports you play. Scientists at the University of Kent think what kind of ground you play on can also affect how flexible your foot is.

Working in small groups, the pupils came up with their own hypothesis as to why foot flexibility may differ in their class. Some ideas were: the type of sport people play; whether people walk to school or not and how many hours people spend sitting down.

Once the hypotheses had been decided, the pupils got to work on collecting the foot flexibility data by taking careful measurements and following a series of calculations. 

A class list of foot flexibility was then produced on Excel and shared with the pupils on Google Drive. The hypotheses were added to the spreadsheet and the pupils input their answers to a series of questions to support the testing of hypotheses (for example, which sports they played and if they walked to school or not). 

Each of the groups then used the information on the spreadsheet to collate their chosen data set and analyse the data by calculating averages.

 A lower score indicates a greater foot flexibility. Below are some of the findings from 6JE:

The pupils then presented their findings using a graph.

I think it's fair to say that Year Six definitely weren't dragging their feet with this investigation - good work!