- My love of kites started about 20 years ago.
I taught math for 35 years.
I just combined the two to try to reach all of my students.
I figured, why not take this whole math lesson outside?
Maybe, just maybe, they would see the relationship.
- My name is Winfred Randolph Lowe,
but in Delray on the beach when I'm flying my kites,
they call me Randy The Kite Man.
(upbeat music)
I started flying kites 20 years ago.
I bought my first kite, and I never looked back.
I fly my kites as much as possible.
I have about 60 or 70 kites.
On any particular given day, you can paint the sky
with sea creatures, whales, scuba divers.
You're not only looking at the kite,
but you're looking at the strings.
There's math there, and you can do something with it.
Kites are geometric figures, kites are triangles.
And that is one of the things
that I tried to take advantage of.
Instead of doing it in the classroom at desks,
we take them out in the field.
Pythagorean theorem is a formula used
to determine sides of triangles.
If we want to use Pythagorean theorem on a beach
as we're trying to fly a kite,
and we let the kite go and it travels up the line,
better known as the hypotenuse.
If we draw a line from the top of the kite
down to the bottom, that's side A.
If we draw another line from that point,
back to where we let the kite go, that would be side B.
So by plugging those numbers into the triangle,
we have just figured out how long our string is
from where we are standing to the top of the kite.
There's your answer.
We could do fractions, common denominators,
uncommon denominators, the more complicated the numbers are,
the more math there is.
I retired six years ago.
We get a lot of families that come on Delray Beach,
and they have kids, and I teach math.
I tell them, "See that right there?
"We can do a math problem with that," you know?
And some kids understand, "Oh yeah, we did that in school."
Nowadays, they see it.
But for a lot of the younger kids,
it gets them thinking, too.