I was watching Jimmy Fallon on the Tonight Show last week and saw this…
After a few tweets:
#estimation180 how many rubber bands to cut this pumpkin??? @mr_stadel http://t.co/07zTqSBuYh
— Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) October 20, 2014
@mr_stadel can do…. Have an act 3…. Still trying to piece together act 2 and possible lessons. Any thoughts? — Jon Orr (@MrOrr_geek) October 21, 2014
@MrOrr_geek Makes sense. W/out knowing thickness or integrity of pumpkins, I guess you’re left with diameter, circumference, weight…
— Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel) October 21, 2014
@MrOrr_geek Could try smaller scale and gather data from smaller pumpkins, noting the thickness after it rips apart. — Andrew Stadel (@mr_stadel) October 21, 2014
I decided to gather some data…..maybe other math teachers out there would blow up a pumpkin and send me the data. I put together a form/activity for people to fill out. See the form below.
So….when the data files in I will send out a spreadsheet so teachers can analyze the data with their class. Hopefully we will see some relationships….and be able to predict how many rubber bands to blow up pumpkins next Halloween!
Here are some videos so far….
Please contribute to the data
Fill out the form
Results
Kyle Pearce (@mathletepearce) has written on his blog about this activity. Check it out!
Here is the open spreadsheet with all entries so far
Here is a desmos file showing some relationships (or non-relationships)
This is my class and our result —- 407 bands
One thought on “Pumpkin Time Bomb – Data Collection”
This is a great activity! I am going to do it with MDM 4U class next week. I was looking at the results and became curious about how the diameter to height ratio would relate to the number of bands. When looking at number of rubber bands vs. diameter/height I got a correlation coefficient of -0.45.
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