KidBridges

ENTRY 1

Today in class, our teacher, Ms. T.

, told us that we'll be taking a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge

.

We got into our groups

so we could talk about the trip together and really get ideas. Each group had to come up with a question to answer when we go on the bridge. Our group wants to find out:

"How many cars can fit on the Brooklyn Bridge?"

Tisha, your question is about the capacity

of the bridge roadway. What are some other questions about capacity that you could have asked?

Ms. T.

The other groups have good questions too, but we like our question best. Next, we had to decide what tools we were going to need to answer our question. Like, would we need a ruler? April thought a tape measure would be better

.

Damian thought that maybe we could get all our friends that own cars, and all their friends, and my family's friends to park on the bridge and then we could count the cars, but, most of the people I know in New York City don't even own cars anyway, so we are going to have to figure out the answer to our question another way.

We can't just guess. First, we have to estimate

. Then, we'll test our estimate to see if it's a good one.

Our group thought we could estimate like this:
First, we'd find out how long a car is. Also trucks. Jose thought that the width of the cars mattered. April had to explain not once,

but twice

that cars can't double up in a lane so width DOES NOT matter.

Then, we'd find out how many lanes of cars there are on the bridge going to Brooklyn and how many going away from Brooklyn. Next, we'd find out how long a lane is. I said that we could look up the length of the bridge on the Internet

. Jose said that we could measure it too.

You're right, estimation is really important in math. I'm going to give you an estimation worksheet

to help you with making estimates.

Ms. T.

We also talked about what we needed to bring with us on the bridge

. We decided to take a tape measure, a notebook and pencils with erasers.

After our trip, we'll know the answer to "how many cars can the Brooklyn Bridge hold?"

Right, you'll know it's vehicular capacity.

Ms. T.

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