A curiosity mode inspired by the day-to-day habits of working laboratory and field scientists
Scientific Notebooks
The bread, butter, and jelly of all good scientists–whether laboratory or field scientists--notebooks are a scientific way of life. There is nothing 'natural' about notebook keeping, however; maintaining a scientific notebook is a learned habit infused with discipline-specific skills, conventions, and rules.
One of the main goals of science is to produce scientific 'facts.' To do so, scientists must routinely engage in a number of practices. These are semi-scripted, widely-acknowledged, time-tested actions deployed by scientists during their investigations. Although other disciplines also have established disciplinary practices, one of the most defining elements of the scientific endeavor is way in which scientists blend and sequencer theirs.
In the lengthy, labor-intensive process of producing of scientific facts, scientists use more than just established disciplinary practices. Modern-day scientists have also developed a number of key ideas to think with. The Crosscutting Concepts encompass some of the key ideas scientists use throughout the many scientific disciplines when trying to make sense of intriguing phenomena.
One place in which scientists deploy their notebooks, practices, and crosscutting concepts simultaneously is in the context of a scientific investigation. Depending on their goal(s), but also on the phenomena-of-interest, scientists can choose from a number of investigation types, such a descriptive, comparative, experimental, and modelling investigations...and more.