Here is a fun experiment for Junior High School students to get your brains working mathamatically.

All you need for this experiment is a stopwatch or clock to keep time, and a piece of paper and a pencil.

        1. First of all, make sure you choose a person who
              knows how to work a stopwatch
        2. Then get get your stopwatch ready, and press it as soon as you step on the moving walkway
        3. As you are going across the walkway be sure not to move or the experiment
              will not be accurate
        4. Stop the stopwatch as soon as you reach the end of the walkway, and record your time on a piece of paper

Remember that twelve inches equals one foot and 5280 feet equals one mile, and 2.54 centimeters equals one inch.

Another thing to remember is that there are 60 seconds in one minute, and 60 minutes in one hour.

You can use these conversions to figure out how fast the moving walkway goes (feet per second, inches per second, miles per hour, or meters per second).

Here are the results from when I tried this experiment in my Survey Of College Mathematics class:

 TIME IN MINUTES & SECONDS     TIME IN SECONDS     AVERAGE TIME

    2m 17.78s         137.78s     138.18636
    2m 18.7s         138.7s
    2m 18.4s         138.4s
    2m 18.29s         138.29s
    2m 18.15s         138.15s
    2m 18.71s         138.71s
    2m 17.435s        137.435s
    2m 18.105s        138.105s
    2m 18.34s         138.34s
    2m 17.99s         137.99s
    2m 18.15s         138.15s

After writing down all of your different time recordings from the experiment
one of the things to try and find is the speed of the moving walkway
 1. Use the distance formula (d=rt)
 2. Plug in the distance (d) of the moving walkway ( 279'10.5")
 3. Plug in the average time (t) found above in the chart

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