Bottle Rockets  - This is a safe and easy lab with my students to introduce experimental design.  Students learn a little about rocketry and a lot about experimental design at the same time.  It is a great intro project and hook for the beginning of the school year.  Each student uses the class hypothesis, but makes their own prediction about what will happen to their dependent variable.  Students  then learn how to quantify their conclusion using class data collected.  This lesson is taught as if students already  understand the vocabulary and the process of the scientific method.  The purpose of that is to build a scaffolding experience for students to draw upon as I teach the notes and vocabulary after the lab.  The great thing about this lab is it can be extended into other projects.  Students collect altitude data using metric measurement guns.  They can then go into rocket design, changing different factors to determine how it affects altitude.  There are also opportunities in math with calculations of angles, as well as English extensions when lab reports are written.