How Tall is the Novelis Sign?

We have a very tall sign visible from the park beside our school. I’ve always wondered how tall it is, so decided we should try as a class to figure it out. We can’t actually walk to the sign, so we are trying to calculate the height using 2 different angles of elevation separated by a known distance.

We have clinometers that we are learning to use, and we tried our best to get good measurements, but it was surprisingly windy on the field, so even with classmates becoming windbreaks it was hard to get accurate measurements. We calculated the height to be anywhere from 6m (which is very much too small) to 40m which seems too large.

It was a lovely day to go outside, and get our hands on the measuring tools and build some sense around how we might apply our trigonometry skills to solve real problems. Next time I’ll check for wind in the forecast as well as for rain!