5 replies to this topic

[skiliftmom]

My 9-year old is bored by the usual math curriculum and TOTALLY fascinated by ski lifts. (He spends more time on skilift.org than any other site). His teacher has given the go-ahead for him to do his own curriculum around multiplication and division, and I was thinking I could put it together around the topic of ski lifts, if there were just a central repository of the most basic info about a number of lifts like distance, vertical rise, # per chair, skiers per minute, etc.

I could make some statistics up, but I don't think it will work. I think it'll only work if it's real world and he can find pictures and maps of the lifts he's calculating about.

Thanks for any advice/suggestions/links, etc.

[iceberg210]

Glad to hear of a young skilift fan!

The best place to look would be in the installation surveys on the site,

Installation Surveys

There you can just click on a year (if the latter years many of the lifts have links to their pictures as well). In there you can get the different stats for the lifts, vert, hort lengths, HP, capacity, type and speed.

For example if you click on the 1997 survey and then scroll down to Utah you can find Gadzoom at Snowbird. Looking at that you could ask such questions as...

Gad zoom is a quad with 1800 people per hour capacity. How many chairs make it to the top of the hill every hour?

ANSWER: 2600(people per hour)/4(people per chair)= 650 chairs per hour.

The line speed is 1000 ft per minute, how often are the chairs spaced?

Answer: 1000(feet per minute)x60(minutes per hour)=60000 feet per hour.

60000/650= 92.3 feet per chair spacing.

How about many chairs are on the lift?

Answer: (6457 (length(feet))x 2 (since there are chairs both sides))/92.3 (feet per chair)= 140 chairs. (it would be interesting to find out how many chairs are on that lift since the site doesn't say and I forget unfortunately but I'd say it'd be right around 140. It might be interesting to have him solve it and then have that lift be one you knew the chair count of so you could find out how close it was.)

What is the uphill carrying capacity of the lift?

Answer: 70 (uphill chairs)x4(people per chair)= 280 people

Hope this helps and feel free to ask as many questions as you like! (also please excuse me if my math is wrong, although I checked it it is nearing midnight here, and late night and good math don't always mix.)

Also this could be a lot of fun as he gets more advanced in his math as geometry and algebra have some great problems to be made with skilifts.

[Bogong]

It's probably not relevant to your kids project, but he might have fun looking at my list of every Australian ski lift from 1937 to 2009. It doesn't have length, vertical, rope speed yet, but people say it's fairly interesting to ski lift geeks. I can provide photos and maps of most of them.

I've also done one for backcountry Australian ski tows which discusses the 'club fields' in a little more depth.

This post has been edited by Bogong: 30 March 2009 - 06:03 AM

[skiliftmom]

Iceberg, That is exactly what I was looking for! Thanks so much. And Bogong, I'll send him to your site. Thanks.

[coskibum]

when your child gets to physics class http://www.tramway.n...Calcs%20Yan.pdf

[lightningpinz]

coskibum, on Mar 30 2009, 07:11 PM, said:

when your child gets to physics class http://www.tramway.n...Calcs%20Yan.pdf

The Colorado ski History web site has a current chairlift database with ride time and vertical drop

http://coloradoskihistory.com/chairlift/li...s/locations.htm

Get him to do the math on Little Hawk 112 ft vertical in 2.3 minutes.
Then get him to figure out how much older it is than him.