I’ll put some pictures on my blog to show the two options.

http://mathcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2009/11/circle-and-area.html

This post was mentioned on Twitter by webbkyle: @ddmeyer gives me some great suggestions on my math problem! http://bit.ly/3zrjQj…

Thanks for blogging on Kyle’s problem. I am the teacher that he created the video for. Comments that I would like to add is that this was for a 6th grade math class for whom area of a circle and concepts such as pi are fairly new concepts.

The students did recognize for themselves that “steps” was not an accurate measure and also as Joe Mako noted that it was not a true circle.

We had done a similar problem previously with figuring out how much wood chips needed for a landscape garden outside of my room. I posted about that here http://concretekax.blogspot.com/2009/10/wood-chips.html

For that problem the students were forced to come up with all information including researching the formulas on the internet, measuring the circle themselves, and performing the math. My impression was that since this was the first time the students were taught math in this way that many of them struggled. My guess is that with more exposure to this kind of teaching their problem-solving techniques will improve.