A middle-school classroom inquiry: Estimatating height of a tree

摘要

There is an old saying that "there is more than one way to skin a cat." Such is the case with finding the height of tall objects, a task that people have been approximating for centuries. Following an article in the Australian Primary Mathematics Classroom (APMC) with methods appro-priate for primary students (Brown, Watson, Wright, & Skalicky, 2011) this article presents two more methods that are appropriate for middle school students who are beginning to learn about the trigonometric functions.