Math Recap: Reaction Time

Monday will mark our first week in our new math groups, but we've worked on a number of math projects during our first three weeks of school! For example, on Wednesday, we performed an experiment to test our reaction speed when given an audio cue versus a visual one. To do this, students paired up and took turns dropping a ruler through the open hand of their partner:

Students recorded the point on the ruler at which they caught it. In this case, it looks like the ruler was caught at about the six-inch mark. Not bad!

For the visual cues, the person catching the ruler simply watched and waited for the ruler to drop, then tried to catch it as quickly as possible. For the audio cues, the catcher would look away, and the person dropping the ruler would give a quick verbal cue. Each student recorded ten trials of each, then traded roles.

Some students wanted to test other senses as well. We added "touch" as an optional component of the experiment, but opted to forgo "smell" and "taste" on the grounds that devising an effective means of testing them had too great of a potential to be  mortifying.

Each student calculated the averages of their trials, then recorded them on the board:

(It happened to be National Talk-Like-a-Pirate Day on Thursday...)

Some of us were surprised to find that our reaction times in response to audio cues were generally quicker than those of the visual cues. We discussed it as a class and decided that this might imply that the path from our ears to our brain is a slightly quicker jaunt through the nervous system than the path from our eyes, or that our brains might require slightly more time to process visual information than audio. Some students speculated that this might have been advantageous to early humans because they would be more likely to hear a predator that was stalking them than to see it.


It was an engaging discussion, made all the more rewarding because it grew from an activity that highlighted the idea that mathematics is a tool to be used, and not just a set of rules and algorithms to be memorized.