🚀 go-pugleaf

I was exchanging some ideas with some fellow teachers the other day, and
we started talking about magnitude... and how today's kids can't always
grasp just how big something is.  Too many times the kids plug the
numbers into a calculator, and it spits out a number, and that goes in
the answer blank.  It doesn't matter if they have calculated the area of
their lab table to be 34,000 square meters (I had a student do this), the
answer from the calculator is usually undisputed.

I decided to "help" my HS physics class get a grip on numbers last year.
When I made up the handouts for the first day, it looked like this

First Nine Weeks

4 Tests at 200,000 pts each
4 Lab Reports at 25,000 pts each
10 Homework "quizzes" at 10,000 each

Total: 1,000,000 pts.

Before the first test, I graded a couple of HW sets.  Kids were outraged
that they could miss 1,000 pts for using wrong number of sig figs... and
so on.  Then we had the first test...

All tests were 50 minutes (limited by class length).  There are only so
many calculations that can be worked in that amount of time, so I had to
limit the test to Four Sections... each @50,000 pts.  One of those sections
consisted of a single problem.

Opened some eyes... and they learned all those metric prefixes pretty
quick too.  Minus 5k for the wrong units on an answer seemed outrageous to
them at first, but they soon realized everything was relative.  By the
end of the nine weeks the numbers were becoming more meaningful.

I don't think they were ready for the second nine weeks... millitests,
microlabs... and a Grand Total of 1.000 point.

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