MAM Day 24: Real World Geometry part 1

On Saturday, I participated in Opportunity to Serve through the Massachusetts Promise Fellowship (pictures to come soon!). There were five different projects in eastern Massachusetts, and I chose to go to the America SCORES project with World Cup Boston at Franklin Field / Harambee Park in Dorchester. Opportunity to Serve is a day of service, in conjunction with Global Youth Service Day, that is organized and planned mostly by youth in different youth organizations across Massachusetts. I got to experience a little flavor of World Cup Boston, an organization that is working to bring diverse communities together through a celebration of the World Cup being held in South Africa this summer. There are different events happening around Boston, with the World Cup final being shown in City Hall Plaza on July 11th. World Cup Boston is also hosting a second day of service on July 9th, visit their website for more information.


In the morning, I co-facilitated a Girls' LEAP workshop for a very diverse group while volunteer teams revitalized the park at Grove Hall and started to lay turf/sod on a soccer field in Harambee Park. After a brief lunch, I headed outside for some service in the sun and quickly got recruited to lay sod on the other end of the soccer field. For those of you who don't know, sod, also known as turf, are rolled up mounds of dirt and pre-grown grass that is laid out for even and high quality grass, athletic fields, and landscaping.


So a big team of volunteers grabbed rolls of sod and laid them out, fitting the pieces together to make a part of the field. It turns out, installing sod is a lot more work than you would think. A roll of sod was about 15~20 pounds of dirt and grass, and we used wheelbarrows to move them from stacks to the field. I tried using a wheelbarrow at first, but they're surprisingly hard to move with three or four rolls of sod in them.

Here's where the math comes in. At first, they underestimated how much sod was needed to fill up the two ends of the field. By the time I came outside, a big truck packed with sod pulled up, and we got to finish up the end of the field. The rolls were maybe 18 inches across and four feet long, some simple math would've covered them and saved some last minute sod deliveries.


Thanks to Sportsknowhow.com, the dimensions of a typical soccer field are 60 yards by 100 yards. I would guess-timate that we covered both ends of the field (the middle hadn't been cleared for sodding) to the border of the penalty area, which is 60 yards by 18~20 yards, on both ends or roughly 2400 square yards. If my estimation skills are any good, the rolls of sod were 864 square inches. 2400 square yards is 3,110,400 square inches, so they should've bought 3,600 rolls of sod. (Can someone check my math?!) Who knows? My guess-timation is just trying to prove that math could've helped us all out.

In the end it doesn't matter because we worked hard and got the rest of the field covered in less than two hours maybe. After we had finished, we regrouped for snacks and drinks and loosely made plans for the evening. Unfortunately, we were wiped out and didn't end up going out after all. We took naps and when I woke up with body aches, I didn't feel like blogging. Sorry for the delay, but I managed to work in some math on my day of service.


I'm glad we didn't have to make any sod sofas, think of the math that requires.



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