Gridville

The activities in this Pull-Out focus on finding the optimum location for a town's fire station.

Activity 1 establishes the context: Gridville, a city laid out in a rectangular grid of streets, needs a fire station. In a very open activity, students decide on the important factors to consider in selecting the best location.

In Activity 2, students simplify the situation and attempt to solve the fire-station-location problem in linear villages, towns with one street. Using tables and hand-drawn graphs, students find solutions to two and three-house linear villages and then generalize their results to linear villages with n houses.

In Activity 3, students develop algebraic equations representing the total distance from the fire station to each house in Linear Village. These equations involve absolute value and produce piecewiselinear graphs.

In Activity 4, students adapt what they have learned with linear villages to Gridville.