Ms. Bearse's Site

Today Elena came to visit again to tell us about aerospace engineering.  

  
We talked about gravity and acceleration, and about projectiles thrown at an initial angle, and how trigonometry is used to determine horizontal and vertical components of velocity.

We then had a challenge, to make paper airplanes that flew the farthest. 

  
We had lots of different designs.

   
    
 
The paper ball ended up going the farthest.  We saw how air resistance can make a big difference!

Elena came to show us about civil engineering today.  We talked about strength, atability, and the distribution of forces.  Our challenge was to build a tower using paper and elastics to support the biggest load.   

   
We ran out of textbooks for this tower!

  
We looked at long answer EQAO questions today.  We worked on a question, and then we looked at the scoring guide to see how we did.  We also looked at samples of other student work provided by EQAO and tried to mark that.  It’s harder than we imagined.

We write the EQAO test on Tuesday and Wednesday next week.

 We were being detectives today.  We’re trying to figure out how tall our suspect is, based off of their footprint length.

We measured everyone’s height
And everyone’s foot length  
  

And put them on a scatterplot 
  

 It’s quite a tradition for us to go math carolling.  
A festive season has now begun.

We are using candy to mark points on a plane that all have the same characteristics.  This line shows when x=y.     
Here’s one where y is always 2, y=2.

 We are measuring the circumference of a circle, and comparing it to the diameter.  
We graphed it, and found the slope is pi! 

Over the past few days grade 9s have been investigating with water.  The water in a bucket modelled the amount of oil in a well.  They had to choose which machine (cup) would be best to remove the “oil” the fastest.  The big cup could be used 2 times a month and the small cup 4 times a month.

   
We used volume calculations and modelled each cup as a cylinder.

 
Starting with 16 cm in the bucket, we predicted when the water level would be 0cm, or how long the oil reserves would last.

  
After calculating and predicting we did the experiment

  
We kept track of the height of the water

  
And then we made graphs to show the water level over time.

Next we made equations to calculate the water level at any point in time.

Many thanks to custodians with mops who arrive at the best time.

   
 
We bit graph paper, added x and y axes and then determined the “a” value for our parabolic dental arch.

Parabolas are everywhere!

  
Today Elena is here teaching us about engineering.  We’re excited she’ll be with us every 2 weeks for the rest of the term.

   
She challenge she brought today was to build a freestanding spaghetti tower that could hold a marshmallow the highest.  The limits were 18 pieces of pasta and 18 minutes..

    
    
 
Here are the results.

    
 
For more information about the marshmallow challenge, check out the ted talk.