Single Penny Lab Report

Objective Statement

The experiment required our group to find out the mass and thickness of a single penny from a group of pennies, with each group of pennies’ being from different years. Tools such as calipers and eight scales were used to find the average mass and thickness of a single penny from each year. Our general hypotheses before conducting the experiment was that both the mass and the thickness of pennies would go down with each newer year of pennies.

Observation/Data

We observed that some penny from the same year didn’t always have the same mass, so therefore we took the liberty of weighing about 3 to 4 pennies individually from the group of pennies that we had and estimated the uncertainties base on how much they were off from

the average when we weighted them all together.

Concluding Remarks
Our Hypotheses was that the penny’s mass and thickness would decrease as they got newer. Our finding and data support our first hypothesis that the mass of a single penny decreased with each year. As for our second hypothesis the finding’s and data supported it with a few penny years being outliers. For example, base on another groups work the thickness of the 1975 pennies were larger than most of the newer and older pennies. Our group also theorized that a major error was that older pennies may weigh more since they have probably accumulated properties from their years of circulation, such as gunk(I don’t know the scientific term) from the multiple times the pennies has exchanged hands.