"Hello! My name is Princess Funer. I live in the Land of Centimeter! My kingdom is a beautiful place where everyone is usually quite happy. In the Land of Centimeter, we love to climb mountains, swim in cool rivers, farm in our beautiful fields, and compete in long-jump competitions. Because I am the princess, I am in charge of awarding the winner of our long-jump competitions. Recently, however, we've been having some problems. You see, each jumper was allowed to measure his or her own jump. And not everyone was measuring with the same object. Some of the jumpers used markers to measure the length. Other jumpers used bricks. Yet others used shoes to measure how far they jumped. I couldn't figure out who won! So we decided to use only one item to measure. As princess, I decided that we would only use the brightly colored bricks from my castle to measure distance. Because we live in the Land of Centimeter, I called them Centimeter Bricks. Things went well - until our next long-jump competition was far away from the castle! Carrying around lots and lots of bricks is hard work! I need someone really smart to help me solve my problem: How can we keep using Centimeter Bricks to measure without having to carry around tons of bricks?"
Of course, my mind was racing! How could I help this princess? And how did she get to our land? The princess seemed to know what I was thinking and said, "My kingdom is a beautiful land that usually doesn't connect to other lands. I needed help urgently, so I used my powerful magic to connect with your land. I felt the presence of strong intelligence near this spot. This portal will open only for you, though. Others will just see a picture of me near my castle. Only you can come through to the Land of Centimeter, much like only I can come through to your land."
Well of course I knew who to talk to! Today I told the second graders everything. They immediately said they wanted to help Princess Funer! We first tested her theory that all jumpers had to use the same item to measure - and indeed, they did. It was so hard to compare two jumps when the jumpers had used differently sized objects to measure. We knew that, indeed, she had a problem.
The princess had left them a series of tests to see if they were, indeed, up to the task. First, they had to answer some questions to see if they could use the bricks (which are NOT heavy to us since we're so much bigger than she is!) to measure items from her kingdom. It was so interesting to see things that we thought were one thing turn out to be another. Like a pencil - in the Land of Centimeter, what we call a pencil, they call a light pole. They ram the point into the ground and hang their lanterns from the top. Or what we call a shovel, they call a bridge over their wide rivers! We used the bricks I had borrowed from the princess to measure lots of items. As we measured, we thought of rules for measuring. We then wrote down our ideas as a class:
- Use only one unit when measuring- Start exactly at the beginning of the object
- Finish exactly at the end of the object
- Don't leave spaced between bricks
- Don't overlap bricks
After we had these rules and our measurements done, I took our work into the hallway and showed it to Princess Funer. She said it was the best work she'd ever seen by a group of measurers and enlisted us to help her. Her problem seems difficult - but hopefully we can help her. How can she keep using Centimeter Bricks as her unit without having to carry around a heavy bag of bricks?