Here is a picture of our setup:
My partner and I first took the mass of the metal cylinder, the mass of a styrofoam cup, the mass of the cup + water, and initial temperature of water in the cup. We then put the water and cylinder of metal in a glass beaker, then put the beaker on a hot plate in order to boil the water. After the water had boiled we took the initial temperature of the boiling water + metal, then quickly took the metal cylinder out of the water and put it into cool water. We kept taking the temperature of the metal in the cool water until it stopped changing. We now had all the data we needed to identify what the cylinder of metal was.
We used the data to figure out the amount of heat gained by the water which ended up being 1800 Joules.
We then used the amount of heat gained by the water, the mass of the water, and the change in temperature to figure out the amount of heat lost by the water which ended up being 0.32 Joules/Grams Celcius. Since our answer was in Grams and we needed it to be in Kilograms, we multiplied our answer by 1000 and got 320 Joules/Kg℃
We compared our answer to the specific heats' of multiple metals and saw that our metals' specific heat was similar to Zincs' specific heat. Zinc's specific heat was 390 Joules/Kg℃ so we were pretty close with our calculations but not exact. Some reasons for my partner and I being a little off in our calculations could be that since we were taking the temperature of the water in a closed styrofoam cup where we couldn't see the exact reading until we took the thermometer out, our readings were not as accurate as they could've been. We also may not have boiled the water enough so our initial temperature was lower and therefore our change in temperature would be off leading to our final specific heat.
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