Frank took a jar of pennies, weighed each one carefully, recording their date and the city where they were minted. In 1982 the government started making pennies by coating zinc with copper, thus making a penny with lower mass than the mass of a copper penny. Frank wanted students to use histograms to discover what pennies are made of. Along the way, they learn about histogramming, the importance of taking lots of data, and the kind of information you can reveal by plotting data. Frank provided pages for teachers and students with the appropriate amount of background material to link the activity to particle physics.
Students can add pennies to the histogram by year and work through a series of questions.
They also learn the concept of background. In an advanced activity students control the minimum and maximum values and the width of the histogram bins. With this tool, they can discover the rate at which pennies go out of circulation and what metal went into the 1943 pennies. Frank warns that it has only been tested with Netscape 3.0.1. Try it with your students and send us feedback.