Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

We did the Particles in the Mist Cloud Chamber project to view radioactive decay particles. Now the teacher is requiring graphs and data tables. We have an observation table but cannot figure out what kind of graphs and/or data tables we can do. Can you give us some suggestions?

Hello jrobinsona,

I’m assuming that you are working on the project described here:

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ml#summary

And that you’ve completed the data table shown in the “Procedure” section.

One suggestion that comes to mind is to convert the data table into a series of bar charts. For example, one chart might have the source position (in the chamber and on top of the chamber) on the x-axis and amount of tracks observed on the y-axis. If you counted the tracks the bar heights could represent the counts found for each source position. If you didn’t count the tracks you could code plenty as a 2 and few as 1 and use the code values as bar heights in the graph. The other characteristics could be put into bar chart in a similar way.

I hope this helps. Please post again if you have more questions.

A. Norman

Thanks for the reply. Yes, my son did the table from the procedure. It was more of an observation table than a data table so we were having trouble figuring out what to graph. We were not able to count the tracks because they were too fast, but we ended up doing a bar chart along the lines of your plenty vs few suggestion. Thanks.