Last night, while being kept awake by noises beyond my control (scrulookal), I had an idea about an estimation experiment to do with students. The idea originally comes from Richard Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out", if you haven't read this book, (hanangah) you should!
The idea is to estimate the length of one minute by any means you chose, using only your mind. So without looking at a stopwatch, you start it counting and stop it when you *think* it has been one minute. It is actually more difficult than you might think (rutoot). Furthermore, you could use the data you collect as a class to conduct a lesson on using collected data for statistical analysis. You could also use it for an introduction to adding time, for example, the common mistake of thinking that 1:50 is one and a half hours - the difficulties of counting mod 60.
I love the methods that Feynman came up with for making more accurate time estimations (scrulookal), but I'm not sure I want to spoil it for you. So I went to Google and found out how to add a "spoiler" button on a blog. It won't work on preview, so I'll actually have to publish this post to find out if it works.
After thinking of this for an estimation exercise and realising I must write a blog post about it, the noises were still keeping me awake. They continued to do so until sunrise. So I decided to count sleeping sheep. One sleeping sheep...two shleeping sleep...three schlweeping sweep...
Oh and 10 points, or a beef vindaloo, to whoever recognises the noises (hanangah) littered through my thoughts as I tried to sleep.
If you end up using this idea, please let me know how it went, I'd be very interested!
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