9/29/15
Last Friday, we didn't have a pennies lab, for it was a work day. Here comes Monday, and I'm ready to take the pre-lab questions about the pennies lab. Well Mrs. Frankenburg said we're doing a different lab. I about had a heart attack. I kept thinking to myself "Did I not get a Schoology message?! Oh God, I'm going to fail this quiz! I didn't even print off the lab worksheet!!" Everyone else in the room was panicking just as I was! But to my relief, Mrs. Frankenburg said there was no quiz to go with it and she had extra copies of the lab printed off for us. We had to get a large piece of paper and cut it up into 567 little squares for the procedure. That took a long time to do! The rest of the class period in fact! My lab partner fortunately picked paper that had symmetrical squares on it, for it made cutting up everything so much quicker! The pieces of paper were meant to represent the atoms. You would take the cut up squares into a cup, mix them around, and dump them onto a table. You would then separate the squares from the ones with the colored side showing and the ones with the white side showing. It was super tedious work counting all of those squares!!! The colored side would represent the atoms decayed and the white side would represent the still radioactive squares. You would repeat the process about 6 times, for it got easier each time to count all of the radioactive squares since the amount of them got smaller. In all, despite all the counting, it was a fun lab because I'm a visual learner and I need to do activities to help me understand and remember concepts. So even though half-lives still confuse me, I understood it better than I did before.
I found this website helpful in understanding the concept of half lives!
I highly recommend that you watch THIS video about half-lives!!!! It helps TONS!!
I definitely had the same feeling when I walked in to class and heard that we worn't doing the pennies lab. It took me forever to count the 'atoms' for this lab too. I wish we could've used a smaller sample size, it would have had the same effect.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the two links to those videos, they definitely helped me on the Unit Test we took today in class, I was really struggling on the concept of halve lives, and was completely lost when trying to analyze and solve the questions that came with the lab. Thank goodness I found these links when I did, otherwise im not sure how I would've done on the test today, thanks for them!
ReplyDelete