I told my students: "Did you know that lab reports should be written in the passive? This is because the focus is on your experiment, not on you." So I told them to do a little experiment to find the answer to this question: How much liquid can be absorbed by a diaper?
Here is an example lab report one of the groups did:
Title: Liquid
Amount Absorbed By a Diaper
Introduction:
This report shows an experiment to demonstrate the amount of liquid that a
diaper can hold. For this experiment, the diaper capacity was hypothesized to
be 375 mL of liquid.
Materials: A
plastic bag was used to avoid leaking of the diaper. The water was provided
from a drinking fountain. A blue color was mixed with the water to see how the
diaper’s material absorbed the liquid. The diaper was the principal material
for the test.
Methods: In this
experiment, the diaper was inserted inside the plastic bag to avoid any
leaking. The water was mixed with the colorant to show the liquid in the
diaper. Then, the water was poured on the diaper too see how much liquid it
could stand. The diaper was cut with a pair of scissors to allow the water to
pour into the absorbing material. The water was poured until the diaper was
saturated.
Results: The diaper reached its limit of liquid capacity when the
fourth glass of water was poured. The water started leaking because the diaper
was saturated. At the beginning of the experiment, the amount of water was
expected to be 375 mL, but at the end of the test, the diaper reached 875 mL.
