Middle School Science Blog

Materials:

• Lesson plans:
  • Population Education
    • you will need page 6 for the Mining Area Grid
  • The American Coal Foundation
  • American Geosciences Institute
• Google Sheets Spreadsheet – Public Link – students can enter their expenses and determine their profits
• Cookie Mining Spreadsheet – Worksheet to keep track of expenses
• Equipment:
  • Box of rounded toothpicks
  • Box of flat toothpicks
  • Box of small paper clips
• Cookies: be mindful of food allergies
  • chocolate candy pieces
  • regular chocolate chips
  • chunky chocolate
• “Working in a Coal Mine” by Devo – playing the song 2 times = about 5 minute

This is one of my favorite activities from our minerals and mining unit. It takes about 1 whole class period to explain the activity, collect data, eat the cookie (& crumbs), and clean up. We discuss our results the next class and determine who made the most profit.

When determining the value of the chocolate ore, I have the students place their chocolate pieces close together in one area of the map. When they are done, I go around and circle the area of chocolate and give their chocolate a rating. They count the number of boxes their chocolate covers and enter it into their spreadsheet.

If there are crumbs attached to the chocolate, I call that ‘slag’ and it lowers the value of the chocolate ore. This leads to a great discussion afterwards when we compare the profits and talk about land use. Is it better to get out as much chocolate as you can, even if you get a lot of slag, or is it better to remove just the chocolate even though you will have less in the end? How is this similar to coal mining? Diamond mining?