North York data projectWhich North York ice pad has the most room to skate? Measuring the City’s rink files
Parks, Forestry & Recreation publishes two rink lists as open data: one for indoor ice and one for outdoor artificial rinks. Both have a column called Community Council Area, and North York is one of its values. Our older kids keep those rows, multiply length by width, and rank the results. Every figure below is our own calculation from files downloaded on 22 October 2026.
Ice pad areas in the North York Community Council Area, our calculation from the City of Toronto Indoor Ice Rinks and Outdoor Artificial Ice Rinks files (lengths and widths in feet, as the files give them)| Pad size (feet) | Area in square feet | Area in square metres (rounded) | North York pads this size |
|---|
| 180 by 135 (outdoor) | 24,300 | 2,258 | 1 |
| 180 by 120 (outdoor) | 21,600 | 2,007 | 2 |
| 185 by 85 (14 indoor, 4 outdoor) | 15,725 | 1,461 | 18 |
| 180 by 80 (indoor) | 14,400 | 1,338 | 1 |
| 289 by 49 (outdoor) | 14,161 | 1,316 | 1 |
| 160 by 73 (indoor) | 11,680 | 1,085 | 1 |
| 160 by 70 (indoor) | 11,200 | 1,041 | 1 |
| 132 by 58 (outdoor) | 7,656 | 711 | 1 |
The indoor file lists 20 North York rows and the outdoor file 13, one of them a skate trail rather than a pad. Seven rows have no length or width at all, so the table covers 26 pads. The indoor file explains that sizes follow “Hockey Canada Line Markings diagrams approved by Hockey Canada”, which is why 185 by 85 turns up so often: the file labels it Regular(185X85), and three North York indoor pads carry the label Undersized(less than 185X85). Here is the program a 10- or 11-year-old writes, with the two downloads renamed indoor.csv and outdoor.csv:import csv
pads = []
for name, lcol, wcol in [("indoor.csv", "Pad Length", "Pad Width"),
("outdoor.csv", "Pad Length (ft.)", "Pad Width (ft.)")]:
for row in csv.DictReader(open(name, encoding="utf-8")):
if row["Community Council Area"] == "North York":
try:
pads.append(int(row[lcol]) * int(row[wcol]))
except ValueError:
print("no size given, skipped")
pads.sort(reverse=True)
print(len(pads), "pads with a size")
print("biggest:", pads[0], "square feet")
print("in square metres:", round(pads[0] * 0.3048 ** 2))
Two files, one loop
The files name their size columns differently, Pad Length in one and Pad Length (ft.) in the other. Rather than copy the loop twice, the child lists each file with its own column names and loops over that list.
Blank sizes
Some rows hold an empty cell or the word None. Turning that into a number fails, and Python raises ValueError. The try and except lines catch it, print a note and move on: seven notes appear, and 26 areas remain.
Rank and convert
Sorting from largest down puts 24,300 square feet first. One foot is exactly 0.3048 metres, so a square foot is 0.3048 squared square metres, and the program reports about 2,258.
The longest is not the largest
Ask a class which pad is biggest and someone points at the 289-foot one. It is the longest in North York, but at 49 feet wide its area is 14,161 square feet, smaller than a standard 185 by 85 pad. Children who see this have learned something about area that a worksheet rarely shows them.
A second puzzle sits in the location numbers. The indoor North York rows use 18 different location IDs and the outdoor rows use 10, yet together there are only 27, because one site appears in both files with indoor ice and an outdoor pad. Counting places, not rows, means removing that repeat, and a Python set does it in one line. Other facts in the files are worth a class discussion: all 13 outdoor rows are marked as lit; 15 of the 20 indoor rows are run by the City’s recreation division and 5 by an arena board, and the file notes that “Eight arenas in Toronto are operated by volunteer Arena Boards of Management”. The North York rows fall in wards 6, 8, 15, 16, 17 and 18, which the City’s ward file names York Centre, Eglinton-Lawrence, Don Valley West, Don Valley East, Don Valley North and Willowdale. We use the Community Council Area as the City labels it and make no claim about older municipal boundaries. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence - Toronto (licence; indoor rinks; outdoor rinks).
