Half Live Lab

Yesterday, my lab partner and I finished calculating and inputting data into excel. The data I'm talking about is the data we recieved from the experiment we did 2 or 3 days ago. The expreiment was quite simple, we cut pieces of paper into 567 pieces, I will explain why later, and we pretended that the 567 pieces of paper was a sample of a radioactive element. the way this works is the paper is colored on one side and isnt on the other, after you cut the paper you  put it into a cup and then pour them all out. At this point some of the paper should be color side up, and the other should just be plain white. Once you have poured out the pieces you serperate them ad choose either the colored or non-colored pieces of paper to be the decayed portion of the element, and the non-decayed portion. The idea is that you are simulating a half live by doing this since you should have close to 50% of the pieces to have decayed and 50% to have not. Of course in real life it will always be exactly 50% decayed if the element underwent a half live. After you serpearate them, you take the "non-decayed" portion, and you do the same thing, but with only those. You repeat that about 6 times the ncollect data on how many were left each time. Now for the reason we did this, not only did it help us understand the idea of half lives, but once we graphed our data it visually represented what the graph of a half live looked like.

This is what the the paper looked like inside the cup

(half of it was birthday decorated, the other half was plain).

This paper had a scenario that we had to figure out, we had to figure out who the victim was

by using halve lives and the information given. Although the data we collected was not mandatory in figuring out who the victim was, it helps alot to have it visualized in your head what halve lives look like.

Here is are some links to websites that can help you with half lives if you need it. Chemteam,

Wikihow, GCSEscience.