Birdseed Mining

Our social studies lab turned out interesting today... in the vein of the mining economy in Minnesota, our lab involved the students 'mining' from a pie plate full of grains/seeds/minirocks/beads with a tweezers. 

I separated them into two mining companies, boys vs. girls. Each had a wagon (cup) to put their ore and I didn't tell them what each thing was worth until after their mining day had ended (10min). The girls got a $10 fine for being messy while mining. The boys tried to strategize by focusing on a particular kind of item: rice, popcorn kernels, noodles, rocks, or searching for beads. They did a lot more sifting and picking through their tray instead of going for volume like the girls did. 

The beads are the valuable metals like gold, silver, and copper. The tricky bit is that there are two white beads that mean they have to pay $100 for reclamation purposes. So if their strategy is to just find all the beads, they'll end up losing money. The other thing they're supposed to see is that iron (noodles) will net them the most cash even though it has the lowest value, showing that quantity over quality in mining is profitable.

After time was up, they had to calculate their earnings. They struggled with that a lot more than I thought they would... most of it was easy multiplication by 10 or 100. Somehow their calculators messed it up. We ran out of time at the end of the day, so we'll do our official totals tomorrow. First glance looks like maybe the boys pulled out a win. We'll need to double check the math.