Half Life Lab

Today in class we did a Half Life lab, but because our teacher had a headache we resorted to pieces of paper to represent radioactive atoms instead of the obnoxiously noisy pennies that are traditionally used in classrooms abroad. What we did is we cut a 12" by 12" piece of paper into 576 1/2" squares, which is an extremely tedious task, and placed them into a cup. We then dumped them out and counted the number of squares that were faced up still. Then those were put back into the cup and this process was repeated 5 times. This is supposed to represent how the process of radioactive decay works.