On a brisk Wednesday morning, perched halfway up the notoriously steep Hamburger Hill, the students of Honors Calculus released their potatoes.
When Calculus teacher Rosalynn Wolfe first found out that OVS was home to the Spuds, she knew she would need to find some way to incorporate potatoes into her math classes.
“When I first came to campus,” Ms. Wolfe said, “I saw the potential in applying mathematics to the OVS environment and took inspiration from this notion.”
The solution, she decided, would be to roll potatoes down one of Upper Campus’ many hills and apply the results to what the students are learning in class.
Because the Honors Calculus class doesn’t have the pressure of adhering to a strict AP timeline, Ms. Wolfe knew this class of three students would be the perfect one to bring her vision to life.
“The key advantage to Honors Calculus is time,” Ms. Wolfe explained. “I can teach the material at a comfortable pace knowing what needs to be covered by the end of the year… While both AP Calculus AB and Honor Calculus learn the same content, we have an extra month or more to stretch for more in depth activities.”
Using their knowledge of instantaneous rate of change then applying that to a physics situation with variables like position, velocity, and acceleration, the class attempted its lab.
The first step was to find a hill to roll the potatoes down. After trying out a hill near the courtyard, the students decided they needed something steeper. So, they turned to Hamburger Hill, the steepest one of all.
Two students stood at the top of the hill, waiting to roll the potatoes. The other two, along with Ms. Wolfe, stood close to the bottom to time how long it took for the potato to cover the distance between the two groups and record videos of the rolls.
After completing 10 trials for one potato, they were only able to finish about four trials for the other potato, which rolled off the hill into a small ravine and was unfortunately irretrievable.
They discovered the results didn’t exactly come out as nicely as they were expected to. In some trials, the potato hit the side of the mountain and didn’t complete the journey to the bottom of the hill. In other trials, the potato didn’t seem to roll, but rather bounced because of the vegetable’s uneven shape.
“Our results are mixed… I expected the potatoes to roll a little better, but it added for some interesting variables,” junior Sebastian Wayman-Dalo commented. “I also think that one of the biggest challenges was actually rolling the potato down the hill and then having to go into the pit when it rolled off the hill. But, otherwise, it went as smoothly as you would expect rolling a potato would be.”
It was originally Ms. Wolfe’s plan to incorporate a physics tracking software that graphed the path of the rolls, but the class encountered technical difficulties in uploading their data to the software.
Because she wants to be able to expand even more on the results without compromising starting a new unit, Ms. Wolfe decided to postpone further calculations until after Thanksgiving Break. Upon their return, the class will then return to the lab and finish their calculations and potentially conduct more trials.
“The fun part of any math lab activity is its inherent unpredictability,” Ms. Wolfe said. “I knew the potato’s roll would be a different trajectory and function than a sphere of any kind. Beyond that, I was hoping we would derive key functions that would help solidify the relationship between position, velocity, and acceleration.”
The students of Honors Calculus are enjoying learning mathematics in a non-traditional manner and look forward to expanding on the data from the experiment as well as conducting more hands-on labs throughout the school year
“I think that the potential for interesting yet relevant labs that Ms Wolfe has for us is pretty great,” Sebastian said. “That’s one of the reasons why I’m enjoying Honors Calculus so much.”
Even though the results weren’t perfectly clear, the lesson is still just as valuable. With the help of her current class, Ms. Wolfe will use what was learned this year to make the lab better for her classes in future years.
“Honors Calculus [has] given the [students an] opportunity to see what mathematicians do when they are working on research. Often, the problems are not neat and tidy, the numbers aren’t pretty, and it’s a stretch to make sense of the data in front of a researcher,” Ms. Wolfe concluded. “It’s my hope that Honors Calculus students will remember some of the course because the activities provide deeper roots for committing the content to memory.”