Investigating Mathematics Inquiry

This term Year 6 have been looking at a Fermi question in Mathematics of their choosing. A Fermi question is a problem that does not have an exact answer. Year 6 have been planning and working on it for many weeks and have made some spectacular discoveries! Since the creative minds in year 6 got to create their own questions, there were a variety and here are some examples:

• What percentage of the school’s electricity is powered by solar panels? Should we be using more?
  From Nina Genc, Saskia Sostaric and Luella Zillman

• If a child was late for school by 30 mins every day for a week, how would it affect them?
  From Gemma Shennan, Sophie Wu and Ashanti Gillies

• How many trees could we save if we stopped using paper at SCEGGS?
  From Perri Lawrence, Brigitte Deeming-Hall and Adison Lewis

Last week one of these groups had the pleasure of getting their hands dirty and going through the bin for their research.

The group members found some shocking discoveries, such as landfill in the recycling bins, recycling in the organic waste, organic waste in the landfill bins and much more. It also came upon us that there were lots of full lunches/ sandwiches. When we saw this, it broke our hearts that so many kids don’t like their food or just won’t eat it. Make sure that your daughter has a lunch they enjoy and that you know they won’t throw away.

Our group felt that the rubbish itself was horrible, but the misuse of bins was much worse.

This really made the group think harder about organising the rubbish more and encouraging others to do so. How does this make you feel? Will you act?

Lilly Zadgan and Sarah Bird

Below are some other examples of the Year 6 Fermi questions:

“How many trees would we save if we stopped using paper at SCEGGS?” Our answer is that we would save 105.3 40ft trees or 1232 metres of tree! Our working out was finding how much paper we bought, how large a tree is and how much paper is in a tree. The purpose of this question is to help SCEGGS become more sustainable.

Brigitte Deeming-Hall

My groups inquiry question was “How many people became unemployed due to Covid in NSW?” We answered this question by looking at the loss of employment during the Covid period in NSW and comparing that to a baseline. We also looked at the loss of employment during the Covid period, industry by industry, to verify our answer and concluded that 269,588 people lost their job due to Covid in NSW.

Olivia Plavsic

We decided to look at how much money is spent on Festival on Forbes and how this has changed over the years. We chose this inquiry question because Festival on Forbes is coming up and we were curious to see how much time and money this would take. We believe that this information will benefit for years to come. Finding this question out meant that we had to challenge our brain and have good teamwork. We really enjoyed doing this project.

Adelaide Gilpin

Our group researched how many wind turbines you would need to power SCEGGS per month. Firstly, we needed to find out how much one turbine was and how many we would need to power SCEGGS per month. Since SCEGGS uses 800mwh per year, we would need to divide that by 12 because there are 12 months in a year. This equalled 66.67mwh per month so we would need 1 turbine to produce enough energy to produce enough energy for SCEGGS each month.

Ilka Johns-Hammond

Our question was “If you could only order a lunch order once a week, would we produce less waste?” We decided to do this topic because it is beneficial for our school. To work this out, we collected data like how many lunch orders per week and how many grams a piece of lunch order waste is. Out conclusion states that “Yes” it would produce less waste, 2Kg in fact!

Lucinda Morgan