By Bridie Bereza
School News Network
For high school math students, calculation errors are an opportunity to grow and to learn. But if you’re a Barbie or Ken doll in teacher James Rex’s classroom at Godwin Heights High School, such errors could be detrimental to your head.
Recently, students in Rex’s statistics class applied what they had learned to determine the length of a rubber-band “bungee” cord needed to drop a doll off of the gym’s balcony.
A good jump would bring a doll within 70 centimeters of the floor. A jump above the 90 centimeter mark or one that resulted in a head bump for Barbie or Ken would cost students extra points. The stakes were high, as Rex promised a pizza party if the average score stayed below 70 centimeters.
“We spent three weeks doing the math to get to this point,” said 12th grader Teara Morris, who worked with classmates Jessica Wise and Carlos Arroyo to calculate how many rubber bands it would take to get their doll, “Kenny G”, close to the floor without hurting his head. Teara said the math could be confusing but between the three of them, they figured it out.
Jessica said it took a step-wise process involving a response, explanatory variable, scatter plot, finding a correlation on a website, then figuring out if the bungee falls in a quadratic or linear fashion to prepare Kenny G for the jump.
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