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What is the total number of ceiling tiles on the third floor at FLCC?
To first answer this puzzling question, I thought about how I could go about doing it. I could count every single tile for a couple hours, I could find the information from some source of floor plans, but I finally decided that calculating the average amount would be the best course of action.
I decided also that I can base my calculations on the number of tiles in the area of one room and use that to calculate the rest, but rather than measure the whole room along with the whole third floor I went with using a map on the FLCC website that is to scale with the whole building.
This is a map of the third floor, on this map I’m going to split up certain areas of the building into different sections to make it easier to calculate the multiple area.
As you can see, there are 9 quadrants that I have split the third floor into, now some areas aren’t in quadrants, either because they are an area without any tiles known to be there, or they are an unusual shape and will be calculated later. Also, stair cases will be counted in this as the tiles are shared by all floors.
Also, all areas are going to be based off room 3217’s tiles. Which contains 72 Tiles, this is not counting lights, vents, or other structures on the ceiling that are not a tile.
To begin we must take the area of room 3217 by measuring it on the map with a ruler.
I got a dimension of roughly 1cm x .5cm.
Which means an area of .5cm2 using the formula of a rectangles area: L*W
Now to take the dimensions of each quadrant and calculate its ceiling tiles:
Quadrant 1:
Dimensions: 3.2cm x 2cm
Area: 6.4cm2
Quadrant 2:
Dimensions: 3.2cm x 2cm
Area: 6.4cm2
Quadrant 3:
Dimensions: 4.2cm x 2cm
Area: 8.4cm2
Quadrant 4:
Dimensions: 3cm x 3cm
Area: 9cm2
Quadrant 5:
Dimensions: 5cm x 1cm
Area: 5cm2
Quadrant 6:
Dimensions: 4.6cm x .8cm
Area: 3.68cm2
Quadrant 7:
Dimensions: 5.7cm x .4cm
Area: 2.28cm2
Quadrant 8:
Dimensions: 3.5cm x .7cm
Area: 2.45cm2
Quadrant 9:
Dimensions: 3cm x 2.5cm
Area: 7.5cm2
Stair Cases:
Combined Area of all not accounted for: 2cm2
(Too figure this out I measured about each stair case has an area of .5cm2 and there is about 4 of them).
Now having all the information we need, we can roughly calculate the amount of ceiling tiles in each quadrant using room 3217’s area.
Something like this:
(Area of quadrant)/(Area of 3217)=(how many times bigger it is)
(how many times bigger it is)*(3217 Ceiling tiles)=Quadrants ceiling tiles
Quadrant 1:
Area: 6.4cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 2:
Area: 6.4cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 3:
Area: 8.4cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 4:
Area: 9cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 5:
Area: 5cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 6:
Area: 3.68cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 7:
Area: 2.28cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 8:
Area: 2.45cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Quadrant 9:
Area: 7.5cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Stair Cases:
Area: 2cm2
3217 Area: .5cm2
3217 Tiles: 72
Adding these up, along with an average 100 more tiles for rooms not in the quadrants and another 288 for stair cases the final total of ceiling tiles on FLCC’s 3rd floor is…….
7209 tiles.