danaleeling

The marbles were pre-split on 5.1 grams and 5.2 grams. Less massive on one side, more massive on the other.  This term the students detected a mass difference with the results being statistically significant. The students are always surprised when they get the mass difference correct. One only has a sensation of a faint difference, but no surety.  Yet 14 of 18 were correct with one tie and three incorrect, far from the 9|9 split that might be randomly expected.

  This laboratory was driven by two presentations, one on leaf shapes and the other on how to build a quiz in Google Forms . This term students were not informed in advance to have three leaf images available to work upon. Once the presentations were done, the students were sent out to gather leaf images to use.

This week the students in SC 130 Physical Science learned about characteristics of rocks including type of rock, hardness, luster, breakage, and streak color. Students also learned how to use online tools to identify rocks, using characteristics to confirm an identity. Rock fragments  On Thursday I learned the college had recently received patio flagstones for the student union. The patio flagstones were a type of rock the students hadn't seen before.  Streak sheets and 5.5 hardness test glass  With thanks to the director of maintenance, I was permitted to gather some smaller fragments that had detached during shipping.  Leona working on her fragment On Friday I had the students test their abilities at identifying an unknown rock. The students were told that in order for the college to properly care for the forthcoming patio, knowing the nature, type, and name of the patio flagstones was essential. Their task was to be a geologist ...

This laboratory has two separate goals.  To learn how rocks are characterized To learn to build a slide deck using mobile apps Questions to be explored in the laboratory: What are the three basic types of rocks? What is rock hardness? What is rock luster? What is rock breakage? What is rock color streak? What is the identification of your rock? On Pohnpei there are essentially two types of rocks. The black colored rock is basalt, a combination of minerals produced by the volcanic eruptions that formed the island. Basalt can be composed of different minerals. Basalt on Pohnpei contains iron which oxidizes to form red and brown colors. The red clay soils are also high in iron. There is so much iron in the ground that well water in some places has too much iron to be consumed by us. Out in Nett there is a special facility that removes iron from the well water. The other type of rock is coral, usually a white color. Coral is not a mineral because the origin of coral is in a living anim...

Section 10.1 introduced using confidence intervals for hypothesis testing.  Spreadsheet In the above fibobelly exercise the tested value was 1.618, the golden ratio. There exists a theory that that the distance from the ground to the belly button divided by the distance from the belly button to the top of the head is the Fibonacci ratio 1.618.  The female confidence interval did not capture the test value of 1.618, the male confidence could not rule out the golden ratio as being the male fibobelly ratio. Desmos The shift to 10.2 hypothesis testing with the t-statistic was supported by Desmos files. Above the t-statistic for the females is out beyond the upper t-critical. Values from the spreadsheet were entered into Desmos. Desmos For the males the t-statistic is not beyond the t-statistic.

A plastic storage container was filled with water the day before against the possibility of the water being off on lab day. The storage container permits cutting the celery underwater. This proved necessary after the lab failed two years ago when the celery was cut in open air. Some of the lessons learned and countermeasures were outlined on the board. The calculations were after 30 minutes. Rulers were forgotten this term. The celery worked better than expected. All stalks. The Erlenmeyer flasks were all filled to 100 ml. 100 ml proved sufficient. Red dye was added drop by drop. An initial load of two drops was insufficient. Three more didn't make a lot of difference. More drops were added, perhaps ten to a dozen per flask. The resulting dyed water was perhaps not as dark as last year. This made seeing the conduction hard to impossible. Yet the low dye amounts might explain the subsequent rapid rise of the dye...