In the beginning of this unit, we were introduced to the Pit and The Pendulum, a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. In this scenario, a prisoner is tied to the bottom of a pit with bandages and is surrounded by rats. A thirty foot pendulum is slowly descending and will cut the man in half horizontally at some point if he doesn’t find a method to escape and take action. The prisoner is contemplating using the prison food he has to attract the rats to his bandages so that they will hopefully bite through them and the prisoner will be released. One question we looked at and thought about was ‘How long would the pendulum take to swing twelve times?’ We experimented with this scenario by using real-life models. The models weren’t to scale, of course, but worked as if they were actual pendulums. We used washers as the weights and suspended them by a string attached to a stick. We contemplated different variables like putting a different amount of washers on the string, dropping the washers from different heights, and maybe even if the material of the string made any difference.
During this unit, we have done a lot of work with recording multiple sets of data and determining what variables could make an impact on your outcome, whatever that may be. We looked into what makes certain pieces of information ‘normal’ or ‘rare’. We also learned standard deviation, a very useful tool for finding how spread out from the mean a data set is as a whole.
During this unit, we have done a lot of work with recording multiple sets of data and determining what variables could make an impact on your outcome, whatever that may be. We looked into what makes certain pieces of information ‘normal’ or ‘rare’. We also learned standard deviation, a very useful tool for finding how spread out from the mean a data set is as a whole.