Why did we do this and how is it related to Mathematics you ask? Well, it is related through Galileo. He was an Italian physicist, mathematician, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher. Galileo produced some mathematics. These were called Galileo's Paradox and it showed that "there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares."
Galileo's Paradox
Another thing Galileo explored was gravitational pull on an object. Galileo wanted to see what would happen if he had two of the same objects, but different weights, when released from his hands, what would reach the ground first. With how far science and math has come, we now know that the two objects would hit the ground at the same time because of gravitational forces, but Galileo did not know that then, so he collected data and made his assumption. You can explore Galileo's Experiments here.
This is where the bungee jump came into play with our math class. Before our final predication of many things, we collected data. We tied our 10 rubber bands together and wrapped one rubber band completely around our figures legs, therefore leaving us with 9 rubber bands in our bungee cord. We then grabbed a meter stick and started measuring how far Thor fell with 2 rubber bands, 4 rubber bands, 6 rubber bands, 8 rubber bands, and 9 rubber bands. We saw an increase in length, but a decrease in length between each rubber bands. What this means is with 2 rubber bands we saw a fall of 85cm, 4 rubber bands we saw a fall of 105cm, and 6 rubber bands we saw a fall of 115cm. As you can see the total fall is increasing, but the distance between is decreasing. We could only experiment and get data with those 9 rubber bands, and then we had to make a prediction. We knew the ground was 505cm. We used a linear regression and graphed our data to make a prediction. The graph we used told us that we needed anywhere from 40 to 55 rubber bands, which we thought was high. We then used a linear regression and found we need 35 rubber bands. We wanted to be on the safe side so we used 34 rubber bands. This meant that we had 33 rubber bands in our bungee cord and one was completely tied around Thor's feet. You can watch how close it was below.
In the next video you can see another bungee jump (Hippo) and then Thor's bungee jump at a different angle, and in slow motion.
You should try it yourself. Find a ledge to do the bungee jump with an action figure or Barbie, grab some rubber bands, and TRY IT!!