Patterns Across Space and Time

Math Topics

Tide Measurements (Program wide activity)

 

This will take place after the fall field trip at a beach on the Evergreen campus.

 

All students and faculty will go to the beach to establish a tide marker and demonstrate a method for marking tide level. We will then make the first notation.

 

Students will divide into pairs and sign up to come back at a specific hour within the next 24 hours to make another notation of the tide level.

 

For the next seven weeks (until the end of the quarter), pairs of students will be responsible for making two more notations six hours apart on specific days.  (Each pair will make 4 visits to the beach in the course of the seven weeks).

 

In the last week of the quarter, we will compile all the data students collected and graph the tide’s ebbs and flows.  We will compare the period of the waveform of this graph with other with other periodic behavior during the same time period, such as sunrise and sunset and moon phase.

 

A subsequent activity will use this data in modeling trigonometric functions.