I usually do this, but I don’t always do it at the same time. Sometimes we do it during our unit on cellular respiration and we talk about the increased need for oxygen; other years, we do it during on study of human body systems and use it to spiral back to the previous lesson on cellular respiration and why we need oxygen. It isn’t hard and the students know what will happen, but we do it to focus on the WHY it happens. This is also good for practicing graphing and writing.
This year, I assigned it as a distance learning lesson. Some of them definitely made up the data (like the kid that took 84 breaths in a minute after jogging for a minute), but the point was to practice the graph and explain why the breathing rate increased. So, I wasn’t too worried about it!
This is another lab I like to do. If you do the breathing rate lab earlier in the year, this is a great follow up to why the breathing rate and heart rate go up. I did this for some of my classes during distance learning because we had done the breathing rate lab. Again, some of them made up numbers that were quite laughable (18 beats/minute!), but they still did a good job on the graph and the writing part for WHY it happened. To me, that was more important.