I AM AN EVIL SCIENCE TEACHER! BWAHAHAHA!!

I am going to make my eighth graders calculate the volume necessary to hold 200 billion grains of pearl barley (rice-like stuff). In order to do this, they will HAVE TO COUNT HOW MANY GRAINS ARE IN 5 ML!! HEE-HEE! I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THEIR FACES WHEN I TELL THEM THIS!

But this does have a purpose: to give them a better understanding of the size of the galaxy. Our galaxy has about 200 billion stars in it. And, our sun (which we calculated this afternoon) has a diameter of about 1.4 million km, and it is a medium -sized star, so just try to imagine 200 billion stars....it blows the human mind away. Which is why I'm doing this activity.

BTW- I did this myself and came up with 6 million litres! Tim says that is still an unimaginable number, so I'm going to try to calculate the volume of the school's new gym and see how many gyms it would take to hold it.

This seemed like a cute site. It is the galaxy according to Star Trek:

http://www.stdimension.de/int/Cartography/mwtour.htm

Hey, I must be cool because Google asked me to try out their new Gmail. I feel so special!