The Great Cheerio Stacking Competition

We had a fun time this morning in an MFM2P class. We worked on understanding linear systems and what the solution to the system is, by doing a competition.

Students took turns seeing how fast they could stack cheerios onto a skewer. In their groups they needed to determine who was the fastest stacker.

Some chose to do this by measuring how many they stacked in a minute, or how much time it took to fill a skewer completely, or up to an arbitrary height decided by the group.

Once everyone was satisfied with their stacking, we determined who was the fastest stacker in the class. To do this we needed to decide on a good metric to compare. We came up with cheerios per second as our units of speed that we used to compare everyone in the class.

The next step was to work on creating an exciting photo finish at the end of the class. The goal was for each group to figure out the number of cheerios needed to add to their skewer as a head start when competing against the fastest stacker.

We tied the ideas of rate and slope of cheerio stacking to what it would look like on a graph. We know that the faster stacker would have a steeper slope.

In the end we had our stackers line up with their calculated head starts and see how close to a photo finish we can create.

Many groups came pretty close to having a full skewer at the same time! It was a lot of fun to see how close they came.

competition was friendly but intense!