What's in your Mystery Container?

In class last week my group was given a film container (some of you might not even know what that is...wow I am aging myself). In each container was different elements. We were first told we could not open the container, but then asked to write down as many questions as we could possibly think of that pertained to the container and what was inside. Once we wrote down close to 200 questions (and believe me, we could have kept going) we were given a dish. In this dish were all the possible items that could be in our container. We had to use all of our senses (with the exception of taste) to try and duplicate our container without looking in our original film container. We used a scale, but found that to be misleading because the objects that we duplicated actually weighed different the the original objects. Once we though we knew what was in our original container we were allowed to open it. We did manage to duplicate it. Many times during the process of trying to guess what was inside I felt very frustrated. I was getting really frazzled by the unknown. the point of this is to simulate how scientists feel when researching and trying to make a discovery. The only difference is in the end, they can't open the container to see if they were right. This simulation really got me thinking about how much patience you have to have as a scientists. You are constantly seeking the unknown, and sometimes that can get really frustrating. I have learned that sometimes you just need to step back, and go back your original thinking, because sometimes you make things more complicated than they really need to be by over thinking.