In order to do this experiment, you will need to find an escalator, a tape measure, and a stopwatch.

The first thing you will need to do is take a measurement of the length and height of the escalator, taking the measurements from the very edge combs.

After that is taken care of, you will need to take five or six times. This is done by starting the stopwatch as soon as you step onto the escalator and stopping it as soon as you step off of it.

I our particular case, the height was 208 in. and the length was 363 in.

Now that you have those measurements, you can find the length of side C using the Pythagorean Theorem. This is A squred + B squared = C squared. With our data, we found side C to be 418.37 in.

You will then use the length of side C to find the rate, r. This is done with the distance formula used in our last experiment. It is d = r t, or distance = rate * time.

In our case, we took the average time of the six trials and used that to calculate the rate of the escalator.

For Example: Since our avg. time was 22.5415 sec, we simply moved around the formula so that we were solving for r, the rate.

This gave us r = d/t. Our calculated rate turned out to be 18.56 in/sec. We then calculated our miles per hour and that came to 1.055 mi/hr.

The diagram below may help you with this experiment.

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's Second Web Page and Fourth Web Page and Melinda. Most of us are in this picture but not in order of names.