Density of Soap

Wednesday started with a glance at cloud types, continued on to cover the pre-assessment, and ended with an introduction to density.



Thursday morning I went to pull equipment for the density laboratory and discovered that all of the soap was gone. I checked both the shelf and the cabinet in which I store the soap, and then widened the search, to no avail. I do not know if I somehow misplaced a couple dozen bars of soap, they were used by another instructor in some other laboratory, or the soap was accessed by someone else for some other purpose. I went across to A1 store and Jed's buying up Lux and Royal soap at 65 cents (A1) and 60 cents (Jed's). The bars were small and highly curved making them particularly ill-suited to the laboratory, introducing rather significant errors.


When I then went to pull the triple-beam balance scales, from the center two cabinets in the prep room, they were also gone. I was edging closer to tossing in the towel and abandoning the laboratory, but the core principal to the course design is that laboratories can go forward with minimal and improvised equipment. I thought about using a local mass balance beam rig to determine mass but I realized that this would add more time to the lab than I had allotted. The second half of the class was slated to be spent in the computer laboratory learning how to lay out a laboratory report and ensuring that everyone could log into Schoology.

I checked the other end of the prep room and found a pile of digital mass scales that each had only one or two of three batteries in each. I recalled I had some AA batteries in my filing cabinet back at the faculty office building. I went and scrounged up enough batteries to get three scales operational.


Tania records data, a digital scale is visible in the background. Serlyn on the right.

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