Not everything we have to measure is necessarily straightforward. There’s a perception that the data collection phase of science is the boring part, and while that can certainly be the case, sometimes figuring out how to get your data is the most exciting, challenging part of an investigation. For this activity we have a simple problem: How thick is the pile of papers?

Have a look at the photograph of the pile of papers and write a post to the Discussion about how you would measure its thickness. I want to leave this up to you so I’m not going to give you much more direction than that. This may seem silly but it has a few real world applications. For example, an ecologist may be interested in the thickness of a leaf litter layer on a forest floor but she wants to compare her results to other forests and other workers. The pile of leaves on the forest floor would look a lot like that pile of papers and she needs to measure it. So, given this problem how would you solve it?