How many blades of grass do you estimate there to be on the grounds of Jack Abrams STEM School and Woodhull Intermediate School? One thousand? One million? One billion? One trillion or more?
It’s a question that students in classes taught by Elaine Leon, Colleen Mahoney and Shannon Tafflock’s had to figure out by doing lots of math. The youngsters began by counting how many blades of grass there are in one square inch. Student answers varied from 12 to 93.
“We discussed that our school grass isn’t very plush, in fact, students estimated that in a square foot only about 70 percent of it is grass, the rest is dirt or weeds,” Mrs. Mahoney said. “There are 144 square inches in a foot so students estimated that there are about 3,000 blades of grass in one square foot. The sixth graders used measures of variation and measures of the center to explain the data we collected. They found the range, mode and mean of the data.”
Students were then asked to calculate how many square feet of grass there are at each school. They decomposed the land at each school into rectangles, parallelograms, triangles and trapezoids. Using tape measures, students found lengths, widths, bases and heights of the schools’ land. They used formulas that they learned in class, to find all the areas of the shapes. Then they added all of the areas together to find out the square footage of grass at each school.
Once students had calculated the square footage, they were able to multiply this number by 3,000 to find about how many blades of grass there are at each school.
Here are their results:
Jack Abrams STEM Magnet School: 364,640 sq. feet x 3,000 blades of grass = 1,093,920,000 blades of grass
Woodhull Intermediate School: 302,756 sq. feet x 3,000 blades of grass = 908,268,000 blades of grass
If you estimated there to be about one billion blades of grass at each school, you were right!
