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)
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.