The O.R.E.O. Challenge

In October, we participated in an exciting and fun OREO project.  Jennifer Wagner, the creator of the jenuinetech.com website, has organized this project for schools across America. 

 

The Project

First we made predictions about how many cookies we can stack, one at a time, before they tumble.  A tumble is when one or more cookies fall from a tower. It was stressed that the cookie towers could not be supported by anything. The towers had to be free-standing. Once a cookie is placed on the tower and the student's hand releases the cookie, no adjustments can be made to the cookie.

Each student predicted  the number of cookies they would be able to stack.   We talked about how the word "prediction" is a math term that means about the same as the science word "hypothesis". We concluded that both words mean "an educated guess". After all predictions were made and recorded, the students worked in pairs

pencil	pencil
Oreo® cookies

 

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The Fun Begins!

Working in pairs, students took turns stacking Oreo® cookies, one at a time until the cookies tumbled. No adjustments were allowed and all towers were free-standing without any kind of support or assistance.

Everyone had two attempts to see how high their tower could be stacked. With careful observation, students made strategic adjustments prior to their second turn. Most students stacked slower and tried to center their cookies more carefully on their second attempt.

 

 

The graph below displays the average of the two times each child stacked the Oreo cookies.  Our class average was 21 cookies.

FINAL RESULTS October 16, 2009 Classes Posting Results 712 # of Participants 14,382 Average Stack Count 18 FINAL EXCEL (w/ grade levels) View our Participant Map Averages By Grade Level   Results Were Posted From:   Australia   Canada   Italy   Japan   Scotland   Virgin Islands