The 40 Second Walk

Last week on Tuesday and Wednesday the weather was brilliantly sunny and ideal for our Junior Maths Investigations data gathering for Groups 72 and 81.

The students formed groups of 2 or 3 and stepped out 50 paces to mark their runways in different directions from the cricket pitch on the oval next door. Their challenge was to walk the 100m to their marker and back in exactly 40 seconds. As soon as they took their first step they were committed to that speed, no speeding up or slowing down. Each group took turns to act as the stopwatch timekeeper and as the scribe recording the results in the group’s table. Each member of the group repeated the task 5 times, attempting to get closer to a 40 second result.

In the next few lessons, as the project continues, the students will process their data, answer some statistical questions about it and finally use their data to construct some graphs. They will tick off several tasks on a rubric before submitting their projects for assessment.