Flipping Out Over Math: Bottle Flipping

Why not use what our students find interesting and apply teachable moments instead of being quick to annoyance and confiscation?

While I completely understand the potential for annoyance in bottle flipping, I think by using these bottles and acquired flipping skills there are different things we can teach our students.

Background Information:

Last spring, 18-year-old Mike Senatore flipped a bottle and landed it perfectly in front of his whole school. In ONE try. That thirty-second video has over seven million views at the time of this writing. Bottle flipping is now everywhere and can drive even the most stoic teacher a little bit insane.

Bottle Flipping STEM Challenge:

With all this in mind, I had my students (K5-5th) show me their best bottle flipping techniques and apply it to a STEM challenge. Flip each bottle 25 times. Record how many times you successfully toss the bottle (land the bottle). Add the successful tosses and record your total. Next find your success rate. Your success rate is the number of total successful tosses over the number of times you tossed the bottle. For example: 5/25. Then find your success percentage. Your success percentage is the number of total successful tosses (top number) divided by the number of times you tossed the bottle (bottom number) then multiplied by 100. For example: 5 divided by 25 would become .20 x 100 which is 20. That means that in our example Bottle A has a 20% chance of landing successfully if tossed by you with your technique.

The lesson was applied differently to each grade level. For example, K5 flipped the bottles 5 times and we did the math together.

This challenge quickly became a grade-wide competition. A Leader Board was posted to my door at the end of every day, and the students would check to see who had the highest success percentage for each type of bottle.

The Final Leader Board: