How Tall Is The School?

We had an interesting time estimating how tall the school is. Guesses ranged from 100m to 20 times the height of a student (which would be 120ft), to 40-60 ft, and we decided 15 ft would be too small. We were working on narrowing in on what would be reasonable before we went outside to do the measurements and calculations.

We had groups of 3: a measurer, a recorder, and a clinometer operator. Each person had responsibility for bringing a piece of equipment downstairs and back up. Clinometer, meter stick, paper and pencil.

Groups looked through the tube on the clinometer to see the roof of the school. We measured where the string fell which tells us the number of degrees in the angle of elevation.

We measured to the height of our clinometer operator’s eyes, and we measured the distance to the school.

From there we had enough to calculate the height of the school. We went back inside and worked away at our trigonometry. With practice we’re getting better. Hopefully with this context we can make some connections to what the calculations mean and when they could be useful.