Week 5 Reflection

In chem this week, we basically focused on one thing. That thing was finding the density of a boy vs. a girl. On Monday and Tuesday, we planned out on how we were going to do this. 

At first, we thought that we should use the school pool to figure out the displacement of the water so that we could find the volume of the student so that that we could divide that into the mass. We realized that it would be too hard to figure out the displacement of a person in the pool because a human wouldn't really displace much water in a huge pool. Then we thought maybe we could use a dunk tank type of thing, but we didn't know where we could get one. We ended up figuring out that we could use a 44 gallon trash can. Thomas and Shannon volunteered to be the two students that we would find the density of. They told us their weight and we converted it into grams for the mass and then on Wednesday, we started the lab.
We put a kiddie pool underneath the trash can to catch the displaced water so we could measure it and then we filled up the trash can. Once it was filled to the top, Shannon got in and went all the way under and a bunch of water was displaced and spilled over the top. We then measured how much water fell into the kiddie pool. To do this, we filled up 2 L pop bottles so that it was easier to figure out, and then converted it into mL. Then to find out the density of Shannon, we divided her mass by her volume and it ended up as  .9951 g/mL. We did the same for Thomas and his was 1.047.
On Thursday, we talked about our results.These two densities were very similar and it was too broad of a generalization to say that boys have more density than girls. There were some factors that could have skewed our results, like the water that spilled out of the kiddie pool and the lack of accuracy used in measuring the amount of water. Also, the density of a human depends on their weight and volume, not on their gender. So if somebody, for example, is very fat but has less volume (shorter), they will have a greater density of somebody that is skinnier and has more volume (taller). None of this depends on your gender, just on the person in general.