Barbie goes bungee jumping

This year I have done the “Barbie Bungee” activity with my pre-service secondary maths teachers.

In the confines of the classroom the students gather data about the length of a Barbie doll’s fall for each of a variety of different bungee lengths (with this length given in terms of the “number of rubber bands” making up the bungee “cord”). This only allowed them to test bungees up to about 2.5m long. They are able to get a line of best fit for their data (although no statistics is really required here because the line ends up being impressively linear), and then they can use this to predict the number of rubber bands/length of bungee that would allow Barbie to have a safe but exciting ride for the three storey drop at the stairwell (no testing allowed). I tell them the height of the stairs (9.3m in this case); their aim is to get Barbie to fall so that she comes close to hitting but without actually doing a face plant.

There have been three groups take part in this activity, so far. Of these, we have had two groups where Barbie didn’t quite get the optimum ultimate thrill ride, as the group members ended up being a little bit too conservative in their choice of bungee lengths. The third group, in contrast, had (shall we say!) the opposite problem.

Nevertheless, no real Barbies were harmed during this activity …

They were cheap KMart lookalikes instead!