"The Giant Soup Can of Hornby Island"

I found that estimating the volume of water in the Giant Soup Can Tank a very similar problem to that which would be solved in a Physics class. Fermi Problems are generally used to estimate the order of magnitude for a quantity in a given space. These problems usually have very flexible approaches, because the end goal simply justifying the closest possible guess. 

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My approach was to ask a few questions before beginning the calculations. Mole conversions in Science classes, for example, follow a similar approach to get from the quantity of one substance to the next. 

- Google helped with laying some helpful information: How much soup does a Campbell's can hold? What are the dimensions of a Campbell's can of soup? 

- Classroom context helped with answering: What's Susan's rough height? Based on that, what would her bicycle have dimensions of? 

- Then some more questions: What units are to be used- Feet, Metres, Volume? What's the formula for a cylinder with a bit of its side sliced off?

After putting those pieces together in the right way, I was able to create a rough, but reasonable estimate. 

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For a student to solve this, they would need to know how to ask the right questions and how to put the answers together without being demotivated. At first, the problem could seem fairly overwhelming, especially given the unclean cylindrical shape of the water tank. It might also be frustrating for students to convert between units of "Person's height is ... feet, so the bike is ... feet long, so the water tank is ... feet long. The can holds two cups of liquid, so two cups to ... feet cubed is? Problem solving, especially with real life problems don't generally have linear approaches. However, this is also where the fun of the problem lies, and if student's are able to persevere beyond the dead ends, it's a very satusfying journey! 

I also didn't realize how much context had to go into setting this problem up. While a significant portion of our knowledge comes from very formal sources (such as classroom notes, study guides, infographics, etc.), a significant chunk is informal. An example of that would be in guessing the dimensions of the bicycle! The precise dimensions of the bike were undisclosed, but having a rough guess based on real-life interaction was very helpful.

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Here's a real life problem students can explore. The plant below is "Aloe-Gator Steve", which I found in Edmonton's Muttart Conservatory. If students assume that each layer of leaves are spaced equally apart, how many leaves would be on the plant if it were 100 centimeters tall? For some context, the pebbles around Aloe-Gator Steve are about the size of half a pinky finger nail. 

(In nature, students have a really good opportunity to explore the relationships of spirals and sequences and circle geometry, so they might approach this problem from that lens! This requires a combination of estimation and pattern recognition.)

**EDIT: Here was my solution for the problem.