The "paper" looks like a science fair project to me (a very good one though!) They don't really come up with a new method of calculating the distance, more like

The "paper" looks like a science fair project to me (a very good one though!) They don't really come up with a new method of calculating the distance, more like an explanation that might be more intuitive to some. The average distance is pretty straightforward to calculate over all times using integration.