Have you ever wondered how many ants make up an elephant? Inquisitive minds will be amazed as they use scientific notation to compute and compare the mass of an elephant to an ant. Have participants make guesses and see how close they get. The commentary is complete with the steps for unit conversion. The final step is to put all those ants into a line and determine its length.

Concepts

exponential notation, exponents

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Additional Tags

exponential notation, math

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Pros

• A good unit conversion problem
• Uses the metric system

Cons

• Objective not clear

Common Core

8.EE.A.3