Miller Elementary
April 25, 2006
Today the students used the newest LEGO sets to arrive at the Nick Rahall Appalachian Transportation
Institute through Linda Hamilton's WV NASA Space Grant Consortium K-12 Outreach grant.
The set is designed to familiarize students with fractions. It includes a ruler marked with different
fractions of an inch. This is handy since LEGO elements are not exact integer inches.
Two groups of three students worked together.
The first group decided to measure a 2x2 block. They found it to be 5/8" long. They used this information
to calculate each of their heights in 2x2 LEGO blocks. The average of the 3 turned out to be 85.7 blocks
Then they used conversions to calculate how many 2x2 blocks would it take to wrap around the world.
They calculate it would take 2,524,262,400 blocks!
The second group decided to use 2x6 beams. They found the length of 1 2x6 beam to be 15/8" long.
The average height of their group was 30.04 2x6 beams. They also calculated the circumference of the
earth. They found it to be 841,420,800 2x6 beams!
