Forensic Archaeology Lab (Data Collection)

For this lab, we were told to gather 1 sheet of 12x12 paper, 2 pairs of scissors, 1 ruler, and 1 plastic cup. After getting the materials, I was very curious to see what we were actually going to be doing with all of these things. We were to draw a 24x24 grid on the white side of the paper using the ruler and after, should cut them all out individually. This proved to be a very tedious task. When done cutting, we threw away 9 squares immediately in order to have the necessary 567 total squares. We put the squares into the plastic cup and shook it up, then poured them out on the desk. Then, we separated the squares into two separate piles- white side up and orange side up. After the separation, we counted the number of atoms that decayed (orange side up), recorded that data, then subtracted that number from the starting number of squares (567). For the next decay, we threw away those that landed orange side up and put the white side up ones back into the cup to repeat the process. We repeated this 6 times total. Even though most of the work was tedious, I really enjoyed this example of decay because I was able to visualize the half life process. Tomorrow we are going to be graphing the data collected, which is exciting because, for some reason, I really like to GRAPH, and here's a link to a brief preview for tomorrow.

Here you can see the pieces of paper used to complete the lab and the data collected.