Where Do You Fit In?

Young scientists use a worksheet to help them perform a lab on the decay of a radioactive element. The worksheet serves as both a task guide and a lab sheet for pairs of learners. This activity requires a calculator and has excellent...

Make your lesson on radioactive decay pop with this lab exercise. Using popcorn kernels spread over a tabletop, participants pick up all of those that point toward the back of the room, that is, those that represent decayed atoms. As the...

According to Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, time moves slower when you're working. That's not quite what it says, and in a hands-on lesson, pupils learn the actual theory. Scholars plot the half life of muons, then compare it...

In this half-life instructional activity, students use 100 pennies to simulate radioactive isotopes and half-life. They place the pennies in a box and shake the box. All pennies that turn up tails are removed from the box. They represent...

In this half-life worksheet, students are given a particular mass of an isotope of cesium and its half life. They are to determine how much cesium will remain after 90 years. They are guided through the problem solving process.

Eighth graders explain half life. For this hands on activity, 8th graders use licorice to explain radioactive decay and graph their results.

There are no tricks here! Young scholars learn about the concept of centripetal acceleration by studying the design of the snowboarding half pipe. A video lesson describes how the half pipe design affects the motion of the boarders.

There are different types of radioactive decay, and alpha decay is when there are too many protons in a nucleus. Here is a simulation that shows alpha particles being emitted from a polonium nucleus. Learners see how radioactive decay...

Uranium 235 has a half-life of over 700 million years and is the fuel used in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Pupils see the half-lives and decay rates of Carbon-14 and Uranium-238. They also take measurements of these two...

Seventh graders model radioactive decay using pennies, collect data from their model, apply scientific visualization techniques to their data and create animated models explaining the concept of radioactive half-life.