Are you always on the go traveling from one place to the next? Have airports become your home away from home? Are you tired of being bored while waiting for your next flight? Well, I have news for you, you need a STOPWATCH! Yes, you heard me right. In a class called Survey of College Math you can learn a lot of experiments that you could use to keep your self occupied at the airport, IF, you have a stop watch. For instance, you could time moving walkways which could help pass-a-way some time. Don't you think? That's what I thought. Okay, Here's what you need to do:

First, make sure your stop watch is clear and ready to go. Second, hop on the moving walkway and start the stopwatch right-a-way! Third, ride the belt to the end, but don't forget to stop the watch just before you hop off! Fourth, get back on the other moving walkway that's going in the opposite direction, and again don't forget to have your stop watch ready so that you can start and stop it at both ends. Fifth, record all the times that you got after each time you stopped the watch.

Okay, wasn't that fun!

All right, below are the results of my experience with " Walkway Fun At Lambert Terminal." It will give you some idea of what can be done with the times that you came up with; just in case your next flight is delayed.

First, I made three columns; one for minutes and seconds, the next one. I converted the times from the first column into seconds only, and the third column is for the variances which is used only after you do the second step of the experiment.

The second step is to find the average time it took to do the experiment I put all of this info at the bottom of my data sheet. Now, in order to figure out the average time I added all of my times up and divide that number by the number of times I did the experiment. Then, this is when the variances column becomes of use because I would like to know how the average time compares to the actual times, so I took that time and converted it to seconds.

Then, one by one, I subtracted all of times in the seconds column from the average to see how much more or less the average time was compared to each of those times. Okay, how does the data table below look to you? Do you think you can do this part of the experiment?

Sure you can, but don't start now because there's more. The last part of the experiment is to find the speed of the belt on the moving walkways.

You can find my results for this part of the experiment down below the data sheet, but here's what I did to do to find the speed of belts. First, I used the formula Distance, Rate, and Time which looks like this D=rt.

Second, I took the length of the walkway which was 279ft and 10 1/2 inches and plugged it in to the formula, but before I could do this I had to convert 10 1/2 inches into a decimal number, so that I could add it onto the 279 ft. To do this I had to divide the 10.5 inches by 12. This gave me the number .875. Next, I added .875inches to the 279ft which gives 279.875 feet.

Then, I put this number into the formula in place of the D which is distance, and then the formula looked like this 279.875 feet = r t. Now, the next step is to plug in the time which is the average time from above, 138.186 seconds. This then made the formula look as such: 279.875 ft = r 138.186 sec.

Now, I can solve the formula by dividing both sides by 138.186 sec in order to get r which is rate by it self and that made the formula look as such: 279.875 ft/138.186 sec = r. Then, I divided those numbers and got 2.02534989 feet/second. I rounded this number to the nearest thousands which gave me 2.025ft/sec.

TIME IN MIN & SEC     TIME IN SECONDS           VARIANCES (TIME - AVERAGE TIME)
      2     17.780                               137.780                         -0.406
      2     18.700                               138.700                         +0.514
      2     18.400                               138.400                         +0.214
      2     18.290                               138.290                         +0.104
      2     18.150                               138.150                         -0.036
      2     18.710                               138.710                         +0.524
      2     17.435                               137.435                         -0.751
      2     18.105                               138.105                         -0.081
      2     18.340                               138.340                         +0.154
      2     17.990                               137.990                         -0.196
      2     18.150                               138.150                         -0.036
                              TOTAL         1,520.050                         +0.004

AVERAGE = TOTAL SECONDS/NUMBER OF DATA = 1,520.05/11 = 138.186 SECONDS
                                                OR 2 MINUTES AND 18.186 SECONDS

CALCULATION FOR THE SPEED OF THIS WALKWAY BELT

The Formula: D = r t

279.875 ft = r 138.186 sec.

279.875 ft/138.186 sec = r 138.186/138.186

r = 279.875/138.186 (ft/sec)

r = 2.025 ft/sec

Now, that you've had fun experimenting with speed of belts, I'm sure that you can think of some more fun ways to keep yourself busy with your stopwatch while you wait, so what are you waiting for, get busy!

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's First and Third Web Page, Kevin, Crystal, Rachel, Christina, Jennifer, Candice, Vincent, Esther and Melinda. Most of us are in this picture but not in order of names.