Have you ever played hopscotch? It’s a fun game where you hop on numbered squares. Normally hopscotch has only 10 squares. But some college kids in Georgia made the world’s longest hopscotch course with thousands of squares! To build it quickly, they used wooden frames dipped in paint instead of drawing squares with chalk. The course stretched for more than 4 miles, and it took more than 2 hours to hop the whole thing!
Wee ones: A square has 4 sides. Can you name a shape with 1 less side than that?
Little kids: If you land on your right foot in the 1st square, your left foot in the 2nd square, and keep that pattern up, what foot lands on the 8th square? Bonus: If you can finish the 4-mile hopscotch in 2 hours, how many miles can you hop in 4 hours (if you don’t get tired and slow down)?
Big kids: 1 mile is 5,280 feet long. If there’s one 1-foot square every 2 feet, would a 1-mile long course have more than 2,000 squares? Bonus: Sometimes 2 squares are in the same row. If there are exactly 12,000 squares in the course, and 1/4 of them are doubled up in rows, how many total rows of singles and doubles does the course have?
Answers:
Wee ones: A triangle has 3 sides!
Little kids: Your left foot, because 8 is an even number. Bonus: 8 miles, because you hop the whole course twice in that time.
Big kids: Yes, because 2,000 squares would already span 4,000 feet. Bonus: 10,500 rows. 1/4 means 3,000 are doubled up, so they take up 1,500 rows. We then add that to the remaining 9,000 single rows.
