Lab Report

Tennis Balls Galore!!!

MATERIALS:  One regular sized shoebox, two tennis balls, Computational Commons

PURPOSE:  How many tennis balls can you fit into the Computational Commons minus any removable materials (including lockers). 

HYPOTHESIS:  My initial guess is that 500,000 tennis balls will fit into the Computational Commons.

PROCEDURE:  Carla and I used our resources and started mapping out the volume of the room with the length of the shoebox top.  After finding the length, height, and width of the room we determined how many cubic boxes that would be.  We then took into consideration the cabinets and the extra space in the ceiling.  Once again we used the length of our shoebox top to map out the length, width, and height of each of these special areas and either subtracted or added as it was appropriate.  We found that the total volume of the room was 6,240.5 cubic boxes.  We also found that 5.5 tennis balls equal the length of our shoebox top, therefore the volume in tennis balls of one cubic box would be 5.5x5.5x5.5=166.375 balls.  We then converted the volume of the room (now in cubic boxes) to the number of balls by multiplying 6,240.5x166.375 to reach the number of balls that would fit into the Computational Commons.

CALCULATIONS:   26.5x24.8 cubic boxes (volume of room)
                                  26.5x14x2.5 cubic boxes (extra space of room)
                                  24x4x2 cubic boxes (extra space of room)
                                  8x4.5x2 cubic boxes (to be subtracted for the door)
               
CONCLUSION:  1,038,263.188 balls will fit into the Computational Commons.                      TennisBall