I've done this experiment and would like to report back what I think may help someone in 9th grade to figure out how many miles per hour they walk while juggling a ball.

I tried an experiment to see how fast I could walk while tossing a ball back and forth 16 inches high by 16 inches wide.

The distance was 100 feet and we timed how long it took me to walk this distance while I tossed the ball.

We measured 100 feet with a tape measure and marked the distance with tape.

We used a stopwatch, but a clock with a secondhand would work as well.

It took me 20.06 seconds to complete thie task.

If I divide 100 by 20.06 I get 4.098. This is how many feet I walked in 1 second.

If I multiply 100 (feet) by 12 (inches per foot) I get 1,200 inches in 100 feet. Now, if we take 1,200 (inches) and divide by 20.06 (seconds), we get 59.821 which is how many inches I walked per second!

Now, to figure out how fast I would have walked a mile at this same rate I would first have to find out how many seconds it would take me to walk a mile. First I would multiply 20.06 (seconds) by 5,280 (feet in 1 mile) and get 105,916.8. Then I would divide that number by the original number of feet in the experiment=100 (feet). This would give us 1059.168 seconds. I would then divide this number by 60 to find the number of minutes it would take me to walk a mile=17.6528 minutes. If I again divide this number by 60 I would get the number of hours it would take me to walk a mile=.294 hours. 1 mile divided by this number would then give me the rate of speed I could walk one mile. 1/.294 = 3.4 mph I conclude that I was walking 3.4 miles per hour!

For more information and ideas about this project you may link to a page written by one of the following math artists: Danielle, Darlene, Kellie, Jill, Nanyal, Kevin, Crystal, Rachel, Christina, Jennifer, Candice, Vincent, Esther and Melinda's Second Web Page. Most of us are in this picture but not in order of names.