Pennies and other thoughts.

Post on your blog your group presentation related to the questions on masses posed in class:

What would a penny weigh picked up from the sidewalk?

What would a 1908 penny weigh?

What would a 1793 penny weigh?

Also, post a reflection on your presentation, the other presentations, and thoughts on how these could be even better.

The presentation could have definitely have been better.  Most of the groups focused on the history of the penny from 1793 to the present rather than focusing on what the question actually asked.  The presentation did have some scientific reasoning for how to arrive at the data but nobody actually took a modern penny and weighed it.  I think another problem was that we split up the group and worked on different things instead of taking the question and breaking it down into smaller parts for people to work on.  Like different methods of analysis that could be used and then going out and using them.  I did think of weighing a penny but the section I did was more of a historical research of what a 1793 penny should weight (kinda pointless really) and I figured that someone else would actually do a weighing of a penny for data.  Never trust someone else to do work you can do yourself I guess.

All the other groups had pretty much the same information and almost everyone else made the same mistake of not running an experiment to get actual data.  What is a bit ironic is that the next week I had to measure the mass of 5 modern pennies for quantitative analysis.  I suspect that all of the groups were thinking in “report mode” instead of “experiment mode” and that is why everyone did the same thing.