If you want a great job when you grow up, guess what: you could be an “ice cream taster.” With counting chocolate chips, and sampling a fraction of the cartons, there’s a ton of math in this tasty job! Read on to see just how much, and try it out for yourself.
We’ve included an extra math problem about Easter, for those who celebrate or would like to learn more about the day. Read on to find out about the history of the Easter egg, and do the math on how quickly the candy can really add up!
Today is April Fools’ Day, the day we play pranks on people, like freezing the milk in their cereal, to make them look like fools. Click through to do the April Fools’ Day math…and maybe get a few ideas for tricks!
Just how many cupcakes do you have to eat in a variety pack until you end up with your favorite combination of cake and frosting? Read on to find out and do the yummy cupcake math!
Maybe you’ve seen the movie Ratatouille, where a talented rat shows a human how to cook fancy meals. It turns out there’s at least one helpful rodent in real life!
How do you tell the story of Passover with a Rube Goldberg machine? Read on to find out, and do the math in this crazy telling of Passover!
So March 20 is pretty special, and not just because it’s the 79th day of the year. In most years March 20 is the start of spring, also called the vernal equinox. Equinox comes from the Latin words for “equal night,” because on this day Earth is tilted perfectly so every spot on the planet has 12 hours of both day and night. Because of that perfect tilt, people try to balance an egg on end at the exact moment of the equinox. Does that actually work? It does – because you can balance an egg any time! And, as noted in this week’s family activity on our Add It Up blog, eggs are also incredibly strong. While they break easily if they fall sideways onto the floor, they hold up surprisingly well when you press in on them. Take a couple of small plastic cups, stack your egg between them as shown here, and try balancing lots of heavy objects…you’ll find your egg can stand up to a lot.
We all like different music from each other. You and your friend might like some of the same songs, but not every song, and your parents definitely don’t like all the same songs as you. So what about cows: do cows all like the same music? And is there one kind they like best? Scientists studied this a few years ago by playing different songs for cows to see if the cows made more milk during certain songs. They found that when listening to songs with fewer than 100 beats a minute – maybe about 1 beat per second – the cows gave 3% more milk: in the time the farmers normally got 100 cups from them, they now got an extra 3 cups. Even though people have been studying this since the 1930’s, no one’s sure whether music really makes cows make more milk – or more importantly, whether the milk tastes better.
Did you ever imagine making a humongous peanut butter cup? Find out how to do it here with a little creative math!
Do Double-Stuf Oreos really have double the amount of “stuff” in the middle? One group decided to do an experiment to find out. Read on to see what they discovered – and do the Double-Stuf math!