Photo Credit: r.e. Kittson via Compfight
We’ve noticed that some pencils don’t work really well. The cheaper Dixon pencils break very easily and take a long time to sharpen. The Megabrands and Dixon Ticonderoga pencils sharpen nicely and hardly ever break, but they are more expensive.
Today, Trysten wondered if we could create an experiment to see if we could figure out if the Dixon pencils were really cheaper than the other brands. He mentioned that if the cheaper pencils broke more easily, and broke during the sharpening process (which they really do!), then maybe the more expensive pencils were actually cheaper in the long run because they last longer.
So, here’s Trysten’s question kids:
Which pencil brand really is the cheapest?
Here’s my question:
How could we design an experiment to figure out the answer to Trysten’s question?
Post ideas below, kids. Let’s see if we can think about how to figure out the answer to this question. We’ll talk more about that in school, too, but I thought this might be an interesting way to get some thinking going at home, too. (Ya know, that ol’ un-homework.)
Write your idea for how to do an experiment (called the procedure) by putting the steps in 1, 2, 3, 4,…order.