Week One Summer 2010 Shortcourse : Math in Science Context: Assignment Questions Post Answers

Week One Summer 2010 Shortcourse : Math in Science Context: Assignment Questions Post Answers: "Questions for Wed: These are some questions regarding density that could go on the blog. 1. Did the true value for density fall within the ..."

1. Our true value of the density did not fall within our 95% or our 90% confidence interval. The significance of the confidence interval is that it is created using the experimentally measured density and the calculated SD of that experimentally measured density. We can then say that we are that percentage sure that the true value falls within the range.

2. The interval increases as the percentage goes up because as we get more confident that the true value falls within the range, the range must be getting bigger. If we are less confident that the true value falls in the range then the range must be much smaller. It is not intuitive because students will think that if the confidence goes up then the range gets more precise. I would explain it to them as I have above.

3. Obviously we try to eliminate human error as much as possible or any error for that matter because any error will take you further away from the true value. However in this case I do not feel that an error in the first measurement would plague the following measurements because as meantioned in a previous post by someone else, the following measurements we taken independently and were not based on the value of the first. Therefore yes the first measurement will be further away from the true value but if the other measurements were accurate I believe they would correct the final outcome (unless of course the error made in measurement 1 was too great.)

4. We calculated the power of the bulb to be 67 lum.

5. I like the idea of google docs. I know some of you have talked about schools going to all this and others banning its use completely. I also like the blogs. I think it would work great as a tool for student to student questioning. I had a class in high school where we utilized it and were forced to blog so many times a chapter or unit talking about labs, topics, ect.