My kids bought me this for christmas this year (along with a pi-plate from the same site). I’m not sure if they think I’m just that nerdy or if I really am because this stuff is sooooo cool.

Perhaps it’s my visual/tactile side that drives this, but I’d feel like this activity would be missing something if the students weren’t creating a measuring cup of their own out of an unmarked vessel whose radius increased or decreased. Maybe that’d more time than you’d like to spend on it, but I think it’d be a valuable experience to solidify the idea.

@Scott: Alton Brown is a. maze. ing. The Bill Nye of the Food Network. Perhaps Bill Nye is the Alton Brown of PBS. I’ve often thought of using clips of Good Eats to illustrate various concepts in class. Good stuff.

Is the level of [stuff] in the measuring cup going up as quickly when you’re at the bottom as when you’re at the top?

I don’t keep many of these in my kitchen, but Alton Brown does.

How would things change if I poured [stuff] into one of those?

I think I’d rather see some kind of liquid container instead of a brown sugar bag, though. Big bottle of oil or a jug of milk, maybe. I can’t visualize a constant flow out of the bag given how clumpy brown sugar tends to be.

So many good conversations (and calculations!) dying to come out of this…

The distraction for me, though, is the magically appearing Krups coffee maker. Not there in [A], then BAM! there it is…

I’m not extremely proud of my own work in this (impulsive) exercise but I know which answers definitely will not suffice.

[B] isn’t shot parallel to the plane of action which distorts the measurement lines.

[D] is shot with a flash which puts an extra layer of artifice between the student and the simulated scene.

[E] basically hangs a neon sign in front of the measuring cup saying “HEY CHECK OUT THE MARKINGS” which will certainly get us into the problem faster but won’t do anything for my students ability to see that for themselves outside of the classroom.

Between [A] and [C], I’d pick [C] though this reflects my preference to include more noise for my students to filter out rather than less.

Vicky’s remark about Steve Martin is extremely relevant here. Martin, in his book Born Standing Up, described stripping his act of all the usual indicators that HEY, IT’S TIME TO LAUGH NOW, which forced the audience to pay very. close. attention. to subtle indicators. Assuming the comedian is smart enough to make your close attention worthwhile (and Martin, his dopey recent comedies notwithstanding, is certainly that) that’s the kind comedy (or “instruction” for our purposes) that makes you smarter.

My ideal activity would be to bring in a few measuring cups as pictured and a few traditional measuring cups (and augment with a digital images for easy-to-see reference), have students compare them and come up with questions, observations that lead to the varying distances between equal intervals on the one cup compared to the other. Then take a regular cone-shaped container (like those cheap paper cone cups) and have students create their own measuring cups. They can then test their own measuring cups’ accuracy and re-try, re-think, etc. if needs be.

To answer the question you actually asked, I’d go with (C). It uses natural lighting, presents the situation in the format it’s most likely to be seen in real life, shoots a wider angle including extraneous objects, and the markings on the cup are still visible.

Verizon money fail:

When I was teaching from the Swedish syllabus then I did a lot of problems with a combination of to much and to little information, my students had to decide what was relevant, what could be estimated and what extra information they might need. Now I teach the IB syllabus and I don’t feel IB really support that type of problems so I have toned that down a bit.

As a (not US) physics teacher I would try to make sure the discussion cover the strangeness that US use oz. for both a measurement of volume and mass. I love to make my students make a few problems in American units each year so they appreciate that they live in a country that use the metric system.

When it comes to calculus, picture E gives us decent data for V(h), I would use that to talk about A(h) and dV/dh, we could also discuss how h(t) would be given dV/dt is constant.

/Per