Lesson idea taken from The Math Book (Clifford A. Pickover). Imagine you are given a rope that tightly encircles the equator of a Basketball. How much longer would you have to make the rope so it is one foot from the surface of the basketball at all points? Next, imagine we have that rope around the equator of the Earth, which would make the rope about 25000 miles long! How much longer would you now have to make the rope so that it is one foot off the ground all around the equator? The surprising answer is 2Л for both the basketball and the Earth. This lesson uses this as a backdrop to discovering pi, systematic approaches to problem solving and algebraic proof with a little bit of stem and leaf and averages thrown in for good measure. It was originally written in Keynote so may have a couple of glitches with the powerpoint presentation.
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