A few weeks ago, we went outside to do a Hot Wheels and Real Car project. It was the first time we went outside to do math work and I liked how it was very interactive. We got to work in groups to make the work quicker and everyone had a great time doing this. I hope we can do another project like this before the year is over because I am much better at projects like this than just sitting in class doing book work or studying. I like doing hands on projects rather than in class work. With all that being said here is what we did in this little experiment/project. The purpose of the project was to see if the matchbox or hot wheels cars were similar to the actual vehicle or if the hot wheels or matchbox cars were off and was not the actual fraction of the size that the original car/truck was. .
To start the experiment, we started by going outside to measure all of the vehicles. Each student was put into a group of three or four. Each group was given three vehicles in the parking lot to go out and measure. The three vehicles that my group got were the Toyota 4runner, Jeep Hurricane (wrangler), and the Toyota Tundra. All of the vehicles were located in different parking places in the parking lot so we had to walk from each vehicle and measure the height, length, and width of each of the vehicles. It was measured using a meter stick. We measured in the centimeter unit because it made it easier to calculate once we measured the scale models as well. We had to be as accurate as possible so that there would be as little of an error as possible for each vehicle. We had three meter sticks to measure the vehicles. It took more than that so we just moved the meter sticks up whenever an extra was needed. Once we were done outside, we walked back into the classroom from outside. We sat down in our groups and waited for instruction from Ms. Henck. After we got the instruction, she gave us the small hot wheel or matchbox car to measure.
