How Many Party Balloons Does It Take To Lift A Person?

by Tzu-Li Tien

Introduction Concept Map Project Calendar Lesson Plans Letter to Parents Assessments Resources Modifications

The idea of this project comes from a TV show in Discovery Channel called “Mythbusters”. In episode 21: “Pingpong Rescue”, the hosts attempted to bust the myth of “floating a sunken boat by filling it with ping-pong balls” and “lift a child up in the air by party balloons”. You can find the episode guide in Discovery Website (http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/episode/00to49/episode_06.html). If you could not catch the show on TV, you can probably find the clip on a bit-torrent site. (Due to possible legal issues, I will not post the exact URL.) Nevertheless, there are videos on Youtube contains similar event such as “Lifting a Human Being in the Air using Helium Party Balloons” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSUBL4OQzrA). Knowing that the main focus of the project lesson plan is on balloons and ping-pong balls, it should not be difficult to see that the rest of the time would be spent on teaching students the essential knowledge to conduct the project. The lectures on ratio & proportion, linear function, and scatter plot & best-fit line are meant to enhance students’ ability to record data and find the correlations such as number of balloons vs. number of weights been lifted. After they acquired enough knowledge, the teacher can guide them through a simple balloon experiment. Same thing applies after the balloon experiment. Different from lifting something from land to air, floating a sunken object by filling it with ping-pong balls require additional knowledge in volume, density, and buoyancy. After that, the teacher can guide them through a simple ping-pong experiment. Finally, after all the lectures and activities, the teacher can start giving the instructions for final project. Students will do team project and present their results in front of the class in the end. There are two possibilities for the project. First, the students can choose a person they know, could be a classmate, a teacher, or even a parent, and try to calculate how many helium balloons would it take to lift that person. The second option is more advanced. Since buoyancy is included in the lesson plans, they can choose a real car, ship, or airplane, and pretend it’s sunk into the bottom of ocean. Then they need to calculate how many ping-pong balls would it take to lift that object to the surface and if it’s feasible or not. Therefore, the students need not just knowing the ability to calculate, but also the ability to search online and find the information they need for the projects.