Striving+For+Accuracy+And+Precision

November 9, 2011

During this day, we first learned about moles. Because it was my first time learning about moles, I was totally confused with the concept. Knowing that many students will be confused, Ms.Knowles set up an activity for us. The experiment was about finding how many particles are in a mole, which means it requires precision and accuracy. Normally, activity that we did before did not matter whether few decimals were off or more substances were added in. However, this experiment was a kind which did not accept a single mistake (such like more substance added in than supposed to, recording the wrong mass, mixing with the wrong ratio...). We were divided into groups and each person in the group had different roles. I really enjoyed doing the experiment because we used a tool that I have never seen before. I forgot the name but the tool was used to suck in a exact amount of liquid. This tool really helped us be more precise and accurate during the experiment. To be more exact, we were careful not to loose any tiny bits substance right before measuring the mass of the substance. Also, we tried our best to fill the beakers till 50 ml. We lowered our eye level and match it with the beaker and stopped putting in water when it reached its concave. In addition, we made 3 people do the part for calculating the result. This was because we wanted to make sure the calculation does not have any mistakes and if there is some, we can check with other people and see if they have the same answer with each other. By being careful in everything we do for the experiment, we succeeded in getting a very precise result. Although this activity was harder than usual, we learnt that accuracy and precision required effort. I learned that if we are more careful in the steps we do, we can get a more exact result.

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