Takes an 8-year-old to teach us adults some basic math

Bean-counting boy finds Science Centre mistake

GARY O'BRIEN/THE CHARLOTTE OBSERVER
Parker Garrison, 8, of Charlotte, N.C., put some jelly on the face of the Ontario Science Centre when he exposed a flaw in a candy exhibit. Email story
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Read the instruction panelMath whiz, 8, first to discover jelly bean exhibit doesn't add up

Feb 09, 2007 04:30 AM
Bill Taylor
Feature Writer

Parker Garrison is just 8 years old but he's enough of a math whiz to know when something doesn't add up.

And he found that a pyramid of jelly beans, part of a travelling exhibit developed by the Ontario Science Centre, had a very shaky foundation. Until Parker announced that the formula given for calculating the number of beans was wrong, the Candy Unwrapped show had visited eight U.S. cities in four years without anyone spotting the error. No one caught it in Toronto either.

With 17 interactive displays, billed by the centre as "an exhibition that satisfies your mind even as it tweaks your taste buds," Candy Unwrapped opened here in October 2002, and ran through March 2003, before going on tour. It opened at Discovery Place in Parker's hometown, Charlotte, N.C., last month and runs through April.

"First I couldn't believe it and then I couldn't believe no one had ever noticed it," Dean Briere, curator of the exhibition there, told the Star yesterday. He heard from the Garrison family earlier this week.

The math problem, in fact, involves half a pyramid filled with jelly beans. Its base is 46 by 23 centimetres, height 72 centimetres. Each bean is 1 cubic centimetre. Budding mathematicians were given a formula to guide them: Multiply 1/3 x base area x height, then divide this figure by two because it's a half-pyramid. "Now multiply your answer by 0.9 to account for spaces between the jelly beans."

The solution was given as 22,853.

But Parker is no budding mathematician. When he was in Grade 1, he competed in a math "olympics" against Grade 3 kids. He would have finished second if he hadn't been too young to be an official entrant. When he was 3, his mom Donna told the Charlotte Observer, she'd tell him the coins she had in her pocket and he'd add up the total in his head.

She said Parker realized there was no need to divide the measurement calculation by two because the dimensions given were already for half a pyramid, not a whole one.

The jelly beans have been temporarily removed from the show. But the OSC is unrepentant.

"The formula is not incorrect," spokesperson Ellen Flowers insisted. "But it wasn't absolutely explicit. It required that visitors infer some crucial information. That wasn't clear. We're striking out the line about dividing by two and we're sending out new display panels for the pyramid."

And, Flowers acknowledged, "the boy did do it correctly."

Briere has already sent Parker a note of thanks and "there'll be ... something, we're not yet sure what, coming from Discovery Place," he said.

The OSC, Briere said, remains "an excellent institution to work with. They're a big deal all over North America. This was just a little glitch."