The Pre-Calculus Honors classes, periods 4 and 6, have embarked on a project that brought forward many intriguing aspects of the world we live in, through the analysis of Starbucks’s growth in business and influence. Students were required to illustrate the rise of Starbucks locations since 1987 and were then told to answer a bundle of questions regarding its current and future states. A project that sounds fairly peculiar, the Starbucks project places the students in a position that forces them to decipher the growth of one of the world’s most prosperous businesses and use mathematical tools to predict, verify, and establish grounds upon past, present, and future values. It is an assignment that would equip a pre-calculus student with an augmented ability to gaze at the business world with ease, all while having fun doing it.

Under the guidance of Ms. Smith, students were assembled into groups and were expected to interpret the growth of Starbucks’s sphere of influence through the implementation of illustrative mathematical concepts. The students had to graph a portion of Starbucks’s years of prosperity and answer key point questions by using tools such as scatterplots, exponential graphs, and logistic graphs, in which surprising twists and turns come throughout the project.

All students were then given the opportunity to present their views and analysis on the ever-growing leviathan of a business known as Starbucks, with Mr. Dan LaGrone, principal of Hawthorne High School, being the guest of honor at a handful of presentations. They were expected to present with sheer bravado and confidence, and be able to enlighten the class upon the perspectives in which the consumer, Starbucks, and a mathematician would observe the changes that take place in the project. With that in mind, the project truly allowed students to delve deeper into the pre-calculus curriculum all while getting a great “taste” out of it.

Michael Waespy, a senior here at HHS, found the project to be quite insightful. Waespy was asked how the project helped broaden his horizons to the open world, and what made the project both fun and informative. He replied by saying:

“The Starbucks project was fun. It’s not like going to an amusement park, but it’s definitely entertaining for people interested in math. The project broadened my horizon on the world by allowing me to apply the knowledge I learned in Ms. Smith’s pre-calculus honors class. I learned several things of which I was not aware of beforehand such as predicting how well a company will do in the future and the complexities of companies’ business in foreign countries. A lot of people think, ‘Why do I have to take this math class, I’m never going to use this in life?’ I used to be one of those people. However, the things I learned from doing the project have a possibility of helping me in the future too, as I plan on majoring in computer engineering and I might have to go into the business aspects as well.”

In addition to Waespy’s contribution to the project, students who rose amongst the ashes would later be awarded with $25 gift cards to Starbucks. The first place winners were chosen and handpicked depending on the scores given to them by fellow students and colleagues, thus, making the election process even more fun. The winners of the 2015 Starbucks project were:

Period 4: Angelika Alvarez and Kaitlyn Amoresano

Period 6: Julian Parra and David Zheng

Now despite the fact that these victors have earned the Holy Grail, the other groups, needless to say, did embark upon the project in unique and intriguing ways. From aesthetics and the quality of the presentation, to the sheer accuracy of their graphs’ representations of predicted and actual values, this year’s pre-calculus students have raised the bar for future classes to ascend to.