Radioactive Branching Using Dice

Abstract

Dice rolling (Emeric,1997) is a useful pedagogical tool (Arthur & Ian,2012; Todd, Clifton, Ingrid, Zdravko,2006)) to introduce students to the concepts and essential features of radioactivity. It can be extended to explain radioactive branching. In the process, the students learn about half life, decay constant and activity of a radioactive substance. Terms like stochastic processes, probability of decay, statistical fluctuations, and mutually exclusive processes; becomes clear in this process.

Share and Cite:

Sahu, S. (2012). Radioactive Branching Using Dice. Creative Education, 3, 671-673. doi: 10.4236/ce.2012.35099.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1] Arthur, M., & Ian, H. (2012). The “radioactive dice” experiment: Why is the “half-life” slightly wrong? Physics Education, 47, 197. doi:10.1088/0031-9120/47/2/197
[2] Emeric, S. (1997). Dice shaking as an analogy for radioactive decay and first order kinematics. Journal of Chemical Education, 74, 505. doi:10.1021/ed074p505
[3] Sahu, S. (2011). Frontline, Physics, Education, 46, 255-256.
[4] Sahu, S. (2011). Lab Experiments, 39, 3.
[5] Tayal, D. C. (1988). Nuclear physics. Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House.
[6] Neller, T. W., Presser, C. G. M., Russell, I., Markov, Z. (2006). Pedagogical possibilities for the dice game pig. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 21, 149-161.

Copyright © 2024 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc.

Creative Commons License

This work and the related PDF file are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.