This activity develops a K–12 student’s skills in measurement by using a pool noodle to measure objects. The activity encourages students to consider features that are useful when developing or using a measurement tool. This lesson introduces scale by demonstrating scales as factors of ten. This facilitates the introduction and reinforcement of the metric scale and paves the way to the discussion of lengths that are smaller than what can be seen with the naked eye. The lesson also introduces the concept of using different tools to address different length scales.

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Marilyn Garza

NNIN RET program at US Santa Barbara NSF EEC 0908895 and NNIN NSF ECCS 0335765

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Marilyn Garza, NNCI Nano (2020), "Noodling Around: Powers of Ten," https://nanohub.org/resources/32130.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. elementary school
2. general science
3. high school
4. K-12
5. Mathematics
6. measurement
7. middle school
8. nanoscale
9. NNCI Educational Materials
10. powers of ten
11. size and scale