More on Math and The Winter Olympics

  This past Friday, we looked briefly at the cost of putting on Olympic events and at the cost of going to one but what about the math involved in individual events?  Imagine making it more real by involving the students in judging some of the events or learn more about the torch.  The games begin on February 9th in South Korea.

Yummy Math has three activities geared for the 2018 Winter Olympics.  The first is an activity designed to give students an insight into the scoring of ski jumping.

The jumpers are judged on flight, landing, and outrun.  The judges are given a rubric to assign points as a way of eliminating personal preference and to obtain an objective score.  The pdf on this has some wonderful illustrations and explanations as the directions walk the students  through the whole process.  In addition, there are links for additional information on ski jumping.

The second activity looks at the distance the Olympic Flame travels from start to finish.  It traveled from Olympia, Greece where it was lit to Seoul, South Korea by plane before it was carried on land.  There is a map and the information needed to calculate how far each person  or robot carried the flame.  Yes, you read that correctly.  Three robots participated in carrying the torch along its 2018 km run in South Korea.

The final activity looks at the math involved in lighting the 2016 Olympic Torch in Greece.  They use a parabolic mirror to concentrate the suns rays to a point so enough heat is produced to light the torch.  The pdf has a lovely step by step guide showing how the rays bounce off the parabolic mirror.

Furthermore, Education World has provided a list of activities for the Winter Olympics.  Many of the activities listed are geared for the younger grades and some are not really math oriented but with a small adjustment, these can be turned into mathematical activities. 

One activity is to keep track of the medal winners and then create a variety of graphs to compare gold, silver, and bronze medals with each country's totals.  Rather than relying on premade worksheets with ski jumpers whose distance for the first and second jumps have already been set.  Let the students watch some of the events, mark down the jumps and use those to find totals to determine first, second, or third places.  If the events do not coincide with class time, you can always use the results from the newspaper or online.

There are so many different types of mathematical activities you can do with Olympic results from graphing, to determining over all rankings, to finding averages.  This site has some lovely suggestions for math projects related to the Winter Olympics such as ratios, scatter plots, and focus on outliers.

Finally is this blog with archived articles on the physics (mathematical equations) discussing spinning figure skaters, moving from a camel spin to a standing spin, projectile motion for Ariel Skiers, math and ski jumping, and scoring and ice skaters.

Involve students in real life math by bringing the Winter Olympics into the classroom.  Let me know what you think. I'd love to hear.