Brain games, rain data and the metric system

Truthfully, don't waste your money!
I bought this for when I'm sitting
with a hospice client who sleeps.

You can buy books, or dear computer applications, which give you brain gym-type exercises, or you can create your own fun and games!

I love recording the rain data, but then I loved teaching math, too. Data is fun to collect, and keeps me amused.

I've got 3 gauges, now. Small, medium, and an electronic one. The medium-sized one begins at 0.5 cm (even though we measure rainfall in mm = 5mm), the smaller one begins at 10mm. Someone missed the math lesson! We converted to metric measurement from Imperial when I was at the Faculty of Education (1981). That was fun to master!

This ladder is for area, but it works for all metric metric conversions.

Metric measurement

I made my students memorize this chart, and it was a great little quiz for them. When you move each step on the ladder, you simply move a decimal place. Therefore, 10.0 mm = 1.0 cm. We don't use dm (decimetres or decametres), and we use hm for large farms, etc., but they need their place on the ladder. So to change millimetres to metres: 100.0 mm =  0.100 m, you climb three decimal places up the ladder, with the decimal going three places over.  This requires you to know that there are invisible decimal places for a whole number. As well, you cannot write a naked decimal; we require a 0 in front of the decimal place in our final answer! Nor do we begin a sentence with a number, either. But many journalists failed this lesson, too.

The new gauge is quirky!

Back to my gauges, which are just plain wrong. Blame a designer who missed the math lesson, or a US-based manufacturer.
Thing is, the first two usually agree, but the electronic one is very different. It only registers in inches, and I have to convert it to metric. Even so, it reported 0.45" = 11.43mm. The other two agreed and reported 18mm = 0.7" or rain.

Not only this, but the battery-powered gauge was a twitch to set up. You have to put the batteries in the measurement part, which has a little cup which fills, tips, and registers on the main gauge. Then you put the batteries in the monitor, set it 3 -  5' away, and wait 15 minutes for them to become friends. It took me 4 tries to remember all this and do it all correctly, then it took another 3 days for enough rain to fall for it to think it had a job to do.

The other two gauges managed to collect 1mm of water in the days between, after a quick, but insignificant dump of rain. I think I wasted my money!

Unfortunately, we don't measure rain in cm, as on the gauge.

1.8cm = 18mm = 0.7"

2cm = 0.8"

This collects the water, then flip and dumps it out.
Communicating with the metre on the wall.

It seemed simple enough!
It only reports inches!