Coin Sorters

In lower elementary, students need to learn to count money, United States coins, in particular, are difficult because the size does not indicate value. Confusing things even more, the dime (10 cents) is smaller than the penny (1 cent). In this project based learning, students are asked to deal with the most common United States coins: penny, nickel, dime, and quarter. Students are to use a ruler to measure the coins’ widths, then create a device that allows a handful of coins to be sorted, using gravity. In the real world, banks, tellers, cashiers, PTA Treasurers, kids running the school store, kids with lemonade stands – they all sort large amounts of mixed-up coins so that they can be bagged and taken to the bank. To get gravity to work properly, there needs to be some kind of inclined plane (slope) or levels, or some mechanism to allow gravity to pull the coins from the mixed group, by size.

One example design is an inclined plane with holes for the coins to fall through t