Babies, figure skaters, and spriometers

This week has been a whirlwind of class, labs, data collection, and all things adorable kiddos.  I have never been a fan of February but this week has been case and point of why I am liking it even less.  My planner is color coordinated to the max for this month and we are only on day 3!  Good thing Spring Break starts shortly after March does cause we are going to need it!




Group member Nikki performing a
developmental test on one of the
babies.

First off, we have officially collected data on 12 people for our research study!  While it is time consuming and tedious, we are all so relieved to finally be able to get some numbers down for our project.  Only 18 more to go and we are hoping to get it all done during this month!

We also were very fortunate to be able to work with actual babies for different ages for our Peds lab.  My group got to work with a 14 week old baby and a 7 1/2 month baby.  Their parents were gracious enough to let us do tests and measures, and even automatic and tonic reflexes on them!  For example, if you extend a young babies foot and apply a quick and sharp stimulus to their foot their opposite leg will draw near to their bellies!  It was really neat to see these concepts in real life!  It got me excited for my peds rotation (which is a long was away in October still). 

An adorable older sibling  we got to play with
when working with her little brother

Finally in Physics lab this week the students learned about rotational inertia and momentum.  For rotational inertia, they spun on a stool while holding weights away from their body and bringing them close (which caused them to spin faster).  Wonder why figure skaters speed up when doing those turns when they bring their arms to their chest or why when they do their jumps their arms are across their chest?!  It's because an object spins faster when the weight is distributed closer to the axis of rotation! 


Enjoy your weekend!