When you’re making an ice cream cone, can you ever have too many scoops? That question got our fan Nate N. wondering: how many scoops would be in an ice cream cone as tall as Mt. Everest? The height of Mount Everest is 29,029 feet, each scoop is a 2-inch or 3-inch ball, giving us between 4 and 6 scoops per foot of height. If we call it 5 scoops, we’d need almost 150,000 scoops of ice cream!
Wee ones: Find 1 ball-shaped item in your room. Do you think it’s bigger or smaller than a scoop of ice cream?
Little kids: If you’ve piled 8 scoops of ice cream onto your cone, how many scoops did you scoop before it? Bonus: If you’ve scooped 50 feet of ice cream so far, how would you count up those feet by 10s?
Big kids: If you stack up 80 scoops on a cone, and every 4th one starting with the 4th is chocolate, how many chocolate scoops do you have? Bonus: If you eat your way from the top to the bottom, how many non-chocolate scoops have you eaten by the time you reach your 9th chocolate scoop?
Answers:
Wee ones: Items might include bouncy balls, marbles, beach balls, or balls for sports (tennis, soccer, baseball).
Little kids: 7 scoops. Bonus: 10, 20, 30, 40, 50.
Big kids: 20 scoops. Bonus: 24 scoops. Eating your way down, the top scoop is chocolate (since it was the 80th one stacked up). That’s your 1st chocolate scoop, and it’s followed by 3 non-chocolate scoops. So by the time you reach your 9th chocolate scoop, you’ve eaten 8 sets of 3 non-chocolates.
