Instructify

If you laid a million pennies end-to-end in a straight line, you’d ask yourself, “Why did I just do that?” For that matter, who has that kind of small change?

The nice folks at The MegaPenny Project do. Virtual pennies, anyway. And they’re stacking them into piles the size of the Sears Tower to help students visualize just how big the big numbers are. It’s tough to think what a billion of anything would look like, except for maybe grains of sand, and who’d want to count those? Pennies are more relatable, countable and stackable. And who among us wouldn’t want to see a 300-ton brick of copper the size of a football field?

Show this to your math class when you get into numbers with a lot of zeros. The MegaPenny Project is also useful if you’re studying weights, measures and volumes. If I’ve got more than a dollar in coins in my pocket, I need to tighten my belt a notch to keep myself trousered. If you tried carrying around a hundred or a thousand, I expect you’d develop a new appreciation for paper tender. -BILL FERRIS

The MegaPenny Project