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UESF
Teaching Resources
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You can do hands-on science, math for pennies
You may not be able to buy much with a penny these days, but they make great teaching tools,” according to Stan DeBella, science teacher at Galileo Academy of Sciences High School. There are many worthwhile math and science classroom activities you can do with pennies.
Below are a few activities with which De Bella reports having had a lot of success in his high school classes. You can easily adapt these activities to upper elementary and middle school levels.
Because of space limitations, the activities are briefly summarized below. For more information and to download activity sheets, go to www.uesf.org/pennies.html.
In math classes:• Demonstrate the concept of pi with marked pennies that are rolled across a number line. Mark a point on the edge of the penny with a white out pen. Draw a line on a piece of paper and place the penny on the line with the white mark touching the line. Mark this point on the line with a pencil. Then roll the penny along the line until the white mark is once again touching the line. Mark this spot with a pencil. Measure the diameter of the penny and the length of the line between the marks. By dividing the line length by the diameter of the penny you have determined the constant pi. Use several different coins because larger coins will have a better approximation of pi.
In science classes:
• Use pennies to show the concept of surface tension in the activity, “How Many Drops can You Pile on a Penny?” Use an eyedropper and different solutions to show the strength of hydrogen bonding. The stronger the bonding, the more drops you can pile on a penny. Solutions are usually, NaCl (table salt), NaCO3 (washing soda) and pure water. Just add drops and count till the water flows off the penny.• Demonstrate isotopes with the activity, “Pennium.” Pennies are great models for isotopes. No longer made from pure copper, their compositions from different years vary slightly in weight due to different chemical mixtures even though they look the same. (An isotope is any or two or more forms of an element having the same or very closely related properties and the same atomic number but different atomic weights.) By sorting, weighing and recording data on pennies, students can understand isotopes.
• Demonstrate oxidation/reduction reactions. Pennies are a ready source of copper that can demonstrate oxidation/reduction reactions with silver nitrate. Copper is more reactive than silver. When a solution of silver nitrate is placed around a penny, the copper reacts with the silver nitrate. A blue solution is formed while the silver is deposited on the penny. This results in silver crystals.
