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STEM PARENTING
Making Math Fun on Long Drives
A 3x5 card and a scratch sheet of paper (and maybe a calculator), and my daughter learns some basic math (and how speedometers work).
My daughter and I were driving to the mall the other day when she asked how the car knew our speed. “Well,” I told her, “there are two ways. First, it uses a cog in one of the wheels that reads how fast the wheel is spinning. It measures the speed and translates it into a speed for the car. The engineers who designed the car knew how many turns of the wheels equal what speed.”
“But there is another explanation,” I continued. “There are satellites in space sending the exact time of day in a radio signal. They’re part of the ‘GPS’ system. The computer in the car reads the time in one spot, and then in another. It then does a quick math calculation and tells us the miles we would travel in one hour based on those measurements.”
