Once, when I had the luxury of devising my own syllabus and scheme of work, I started to teach about uncertainty in Year 9. My argument was that it is an important topic, and that starting it early allowed more time for pupils to gain a proper understanding. But I wanted it to be fun, so I got the class to invent the ruler.
If you’re thinking, at this point, that the ruler is rather a trivial instrument, I suspect you’ve never tried to make one from first principles. It turns out to be quite difficult. The first problem is to decide how long to make it — should it be the length of Emily’s foot or the distance from Melanie’s nose to her fingertips, for example? In the event, I decided for them. It was the distance between two marks on an ordinary house brick that I kept in the lab. We called it one stick.
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