General Education Activity | STEM Career Connection: Structural Engineer, Mathematician
Standards: 2007 MN Math 3.3.2.1 & 3.4.1.1
Just how big is U.S. Bank Stadium? Use some common classroom materials and your powers of prediction to find out!
Materials
- Pencils (or another arbitrary excess item in the room)
- Football Field Grid
Predict
How many classrooms would fit into a football field?
Plan
How can we answer this question without a ruler?
Play: Length Exploration
- First, have students determine how many pencils long their desk or table is.
- Have students make a prediction about how many pencils long they think the length and width of a football field is. Have them write this down.
- Have students determine how many pencils fit in a three-foot segment.
- Using the Football Field Grid, instruct students that one of the blue squares is 15 feet long. Have them determine how many pencils would fit in one of those boxes.
- There are four different resources students can choose from.
- If your room is long enough, have students add their thee-foot sections together until there is a 15-foot stretch of pencils.
- Instruct students that there are 24 squares along the length of the field. Have them determine the total number of pencils the field length would be.
- Repeat with the width of the field, using the same measurements as before. The width of the field is approximately 11 squares.
- How many pencils long is the football field? (Teacher specific information)
- Length: 360 feet (including end zones)
- Width: 160 feet
- Unsharpened pencil: 7.5 inches or 0.625 feet
- 576 pencils in length
- 256 pencils in width
- How else could we answer the question?
Ponder
- How does comparing the size of a football field to a common object like a pencil or a classroom help us understand the size?
- How could we make it easier to measure? Would this change make the measurements more or less accurate?
Extension: Perimeter, Capacity, Volume
- What other places would fit inside of a football field?
- What places are big enough to hold multiple football fields inside?
- Explore the capacity of the stadium by looking at the number of stadium seats and/or estimating the volume and square footage.
- Does the capacity of the stadium only consist of people in their seats?
- How much bigger is the stadium compared to the maximum capacity (volume inquiry)?
- Search “360 Degree Look at the Win” on YouTube for videos with an interactive view of the field.
