Math helped students at Scottsbluff High School in Nebraska move middle school students into formations on the football field, the Star-Herald reports.
Using math in a hands-on way, SHS students partnered with students from Bluffs Middle School to make the letters “BMS” on the football field. When they used geometry to shape those letters, they learned a few things beyond the math, including leadership.
They used the GeoGebra app and a drone to take pictures of the field. Once the information was imported into GeoGebra, students got to work. Then they got to work to determine angles and such to indicate where students should stand.
“We want [students] to see how [math] is used in school and outside of school,” the paper quoted Shelby Aaberg, a teacher of the math applications class, which is part of the Skilled and Technical Sciences Career Academy at SHS, as saying. “That’s the intention of this class.”
The drone footage, shot at the beginning of the school year, was used to determine how far apart things were. The letters were spaced at 5-yard intervals. The class worked for about a week and a half to set up the video.
Making the letters was something else entirely: students created a script for the movement of each BMS participant and teacher, using the Golden Ratio as part of their design. The goal was to get the finished product as close to the aesthetically pleasing ratio as possible. And the teachers cooperated.
“We were bossing the teachers around for a change,” one student was quoted as saying. “We would tell what to do and they would cooperate when we told them.”
But even with about 190 students involved, just to make the “B,” gaps remained. The question remains: Did it approximate the Golden Ratio or not?
