Mineral Densities
Joseph Smyth
, University of Colorado at Boulder
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This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Peer Reviewed Teaching Activities collection.
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This homework assignment is designed to help students learn about mineral densities and cell edge lengths by having them calculate each.
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Context
Audience
This assignment is designed for an undergraduate required course in mineralogy.
Skills and concepts that students must have mastered
Students should have basic mathematics skills.
How the activity is situated in the course
This problem set is a stand-alone homework assignment.
Goals
Content/concepts goals for this activity
This assignment helps students understand how to calculate mineral densities based on cell edge length.
Higher order thinking skills goals for this activity
Other skills goals for this activity
Description of the activity/assignment
Students are given cubic cell edge dimensions and asked to calculate mineral densities and vice versa. The final question of this homework assignment provides students with a mineral density and unit cell edge length in order to determine the number of formula units per cell.
Determining whether students have met the goals
Students have met the goals of this assignment if they complete it accurately and show their work.
More information about assessment tools and techniques.Teaching materials and tips
- Activity Description/Assignment (Acrobat (PDF) 25kB Jul7 09)
- Solution Set (Acrobat (PDF) 33kB Jul7 09)
Other Materials
Supporting references/URLs
This problem set is the 6th of 10 homework assignments used in a Mineralogy course.
You can also access the course syllabus ( This site may be offline. ) which includes lecture Powerpoints, practice exams, and links to the other problem sets used in this course.
You can also access the course syllabus ( This site may be offline. ) which includes lecture Powerpoints, practice exams, and links to the other problem sets used in this course.