From Education Week
- April 24, 1996
Take Note: If the shoes fit
How many shoes would it take to fill a classroom? That's a question
students nationwide are pondering to enter the "Math Talk Shoe-In
Sweepstakes," a contest designed to mark Mathematics Awareness
Week, which is this week.
More than 1,200 entries had been submitted as of last week,
and entries will be accepted until May 1.
Classes are approaching the contest in a variety of ways.
For example, Carol Rausch's 3rd-grade class at Milford South
Elementary School in Milford, Ohio, started with a "guesstimate"
of 7,000 shoes.
The following day, the students figured out how many shoes
could fit on each of the floor tiles in their classroom and
multiplied that by the number of tiles. Then they stacked
their shoes until they reached the ceiling. Using this approach,
they came up with a very different answer: 160,950 shoes.
The contest is sponsored by the Children's Television Workshop,
which created "Sesame Street," and Nike Inc., which makes
athletic shoes and other sports apparel.
"The idea was to get them thinking about math," said Laurie
Weisman, the director of school publishing at Children's Television
Workshop. "We really wanted them to tackle a problem that
had a lot of steps and that would be fun."
The winning entrant will receive a pair of Nike sneakers
for every student in the class and for the teacher.
[...]
--Meg Sommerfeld
© 1996 Editorial Projects in Education
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