Somewhat Serious Surveying
For this activity, we had to find the distance away from a play structure and the height of the slide using Trigonometry. There was a fence between us and the slide, which is why we had to find these measurements from far away. We used a straw taped to a protractor (which was weighed down by a string with a bolt at the end that kept it even) to find the angle from one point. We then chose another point (20ft away) and measured the angle again to the corresponding point to form a triangle. Below is my work to calculate the height.
There were two main habits of a mathematician that helped me a lot to figure out this problem. The first one is staying organized. This applies both from marking with chalk where we measured when we were on site, to making sure we recorded the right information and kept it neat so everyone in the group could understand it. The second one was Visualizing. This one is more obvious, but doing this activity really strengthened my understanding of how to use this math, as well as how it is applied in real life. Being able to see how things look on a real life scale was great.