Day 1
- Course mechanics: Taking Good Notes
- In each group, using the unit that has been passed to you:
- express relationships between your original units and these new ones
- For each of the things we measured yesterday, make a prediction about whether the measurement in the new units will have a greater or lesser value (DO NOT COMPUTE OR MEASURE -- JUST PREDICT -- WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU THINK AND WHY)
- Compute your height using the new units (for each person in your group), and compute at least 6 of the measurements in the table
- We'll put all these new measurements in a table, and compare to the measurements the original groups got with their units.
Day 2
- Course mechanics: Writing a Good Summary
- Convert between your units and someone else's units. ie, if the whiteboard is 10 Snoggles long, how many Werts is it?
- Reflection:
- Are your measurements the same as the other group's? If not, why not? (Did you make a mistake, or them, or what?)
- How do your three units compare to a standard measurement system?
- How is using someone else's units like (or unlike) converting between standard and metric systems?
- How did your choices for partitioning, composing, and naming make your work easier or harder?
- What do you need in order to be able to do these computations on your own?
- How do we convert from one measurement syste to another? Write instructions to yourself, then convert the following:
- There are 5.5 Snoggles in a Wert. If the Whiteboard is 10 Werts, how many Snoggles is it?
- If the room is 87 Snoggles, how many Werts is it?
- If the building is 1150 Snoggles, how many Werts is it?
- How many inches are there in a foot?
- How many meters in a yard?
- Convert the height 6 feet, 2 inches into: inches, feet, meters, centimeters, miles, and furlongs.
- Write instructions to yourself on how to convert units.
Day 3
- Course Mechanics: Writing good summaries
- Complete questions and reflections from day 2. Any material you do today should show up on your day 3 notes.
- Prove to yourself that you are able to convert between any two units when you are given the ratio between them (just like you are able to convert feet to inches since you know that there are 12 inches in a foot). This is to make sure you are ready for the quiz on Friday.
- Some history: there are a lot of weird units that you have probably never heard of, even though some of them are still used. On Friday after the quiz you will be giving a very short presentation on the history of one of those weird units -- examples include the dram, the ell, the fathom, the cord, the minim, the hogshead, and the peck.
Day 4
- First quiz on converting units. You can use a calculator and google.
Quizzes are about getting information from you about what you understand and don't understand, and giving information back to you about what you need to still work on. If you don't get something on the first try, you should try again. The grading system is setup to give you incentives to keep trying until you get it. Quizzes will usually be in class on Fridays, often using google forms, and they will be tagged to show the specific skills that I am looking for that day.
A little history: for scientific purposes we care about definitions of units because we need to get as exact an answer as possible, but historically it was more about business. Consider the teaspoon, tablespoon, the dram, the cup, the pint, the quart, gallon, minim, barrel, cord, peck, bushel, and the hogshead. In fact, in your groups, pick one each of these traditional units, look them up, then prepare to explain them to the rest of us.
Reflection:
- What is up with all those units? Why were there so many? Why is it so hard to figure out what they mean/meant?
- What is required to make a "good" system of units?
Background on history of units:
Unit conversion. Again, write instructions to yourself on how to convert from one unit to another.
What are the most important issues in making good measurements?
Is something unclear? Leave a comment below: