I think back on a lot of my experiences as a student, and I notice the things I enjoyed were things I was curious about. I’ve always been interested in things, lots of things, lots of strange and wonderful things. And because of that studying and learning were fun. I’ve had a few classes over the years in things I wasn’t interested in -- those were not so fun.
I have a very clear memory from my senior year in high school. It seemed to me that there was a relationship between the angle of declination, that is the angle a person looked down on a marching field and the distortion of a figure on the field. Back in the day, we did a lot of figures on the field. We made a giant M for MacArthur, and we made pictures. My high school band director had a little diagram showing that the further away from the audience the more distorted the figure appeared. It just seemed to me that there had to be a mathematical relationship. Thus, was born my science fair project for my senior year.
I was curious about the relationship between the angle of declination and distortion on the field. I bought a band directors miniature marching field with little magnetic people. I borrowed my father’s marvelous SLR camera. I set up a tripod with a protractor so that I could get the angle of declination. I made several formations on that field and took photos of them at every 5° declination starting with 90° and working my way to zero.
It just seemed like it had to have a relationship. I began graphing the results and the graphs were the same for the various formations. There was a relationship. The type of curve made it clear that it was some sort of power function. I had studied enough mathematics to recognize that. Then I started plugging in the possibilities until I came up with one that yielded the same curve as my experimental data. This was the days before computers, and it was a royal pain in the bleep to do this by successive approximation. I did have a very slick, reverse polish notation calculator, and that made it somewhat easier. I ended up expressing the terms as width over length.
W/L= the absolute value of 1.54E-8 (m. angle of declination E4.54) +1
It worked. It drove me to distraction until I finally plugged in enough possibilities to find the one that worked. It took months. In the end it second place at the state science fair in the mathematics category and award from the United States Air Force. The thing is, I really didn’t need to finish this project. There were several times I just wanted to throw all of it away. But, knowing there had to be an answer, I had to find it. In the end, I’m glad I did.
My curiosity made me finish the project and find the answer.
Encouraging curiosity is one of the best things we can do for kiddos.
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