Hours of Daylight Project
October 21st, 2008 by SplineGuy
In my math models course this term, my students have begun working on their projects. They will complete 3 – 4 modeling projects throughout the semester. We just completed work on a Highway Design Problem with some basic curve fitting techniques to join two or three different grades (slopes) of road sections using parabolic curves.
In the current project, three teams are developing a formula to calculate the number of hours of daylight that a given point (of latitude) receives for each day of the year. I’ve introduced the problem and laid out some notation and assumptions to guide them along. Here are some snapshots from the board on Monday. The students asked that I document these notes since their copies did not do justice the concepts they were supposed to represent.
