Hello!! It’s me Jordyn, back with another post! This one will be a little bit different than the others, To the Coast, The Art of Advertising, or In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…, its going to be about my math class! So for this unit we have been working on surface area and volume. Instead of kind of easing us into it, our teacher surprised us with a project. Even better, she left for a week while we were doing it which made it a little bit difficult. But she left us very prepared and ready to do this project on our own. So, the point of this project was to increase the surface area of the door to our classroom by five times. It may sound easy or it may not, whatever, but it definitely was not. It was very difficult. We split the door into 5 sections and split our class into five groups so we could all work on a section and just increase that section by 5. In my group was Paisley, Luciano, and Emerson. What made it even harder was that we chose one of the hardest shapes, a triangular prism. We did this because we wanted to challenge ourselves.The first thing we had to do was create a model net with all of the measurements we needed so that we could base all of our other shapes off of that one.

This is our net showing all of our measurements for each side

 

To lighten the load, we split the work in half. Paisley and I did a lot of the calculations and Emerson and Luciano did most of the drawing and cutting. Once we did all of our calculations and made our shapes and stuck them to the door, we realized we had done something really wrong. We were off by about half of the surface area we needed! We were almost out of time and we still had almost 14 more shapes to make. In our heads we were all like “This is the end!” But… then….💡*ding*. A light bulb went off in our heads. We thought back to the beginning of the project when our teacher told us that a surface is anything you can paint.

 

So we had the brilliant idea to just simply open the top of our triangular prism because the we had the inside faces of the shape as well. Which, technically, doubled our surface area. So we got to work using these awesome sharp thingies, cutting open our shapes. After we had done this, put the shapes on the door and calculated the surface area, we realized we were only off by a tiny bit. So we made a tiny cube to finish off the left over surface area. Our section is the bottom right corner, you can see it in the picture below 👇👇

The finished product!!

The last thing we had to do to end the project was a technical report. We had to write a paper of all of our calculations and nets and all of that other mathematical jazz.

 

At first this project seemed pointless, why would you want to increase the surface area of any door by 5 times? There is just no point. But through out the project, I slowly realized it went deeper than that. We were learning how to use complex formulas, how to create a net, and how to think, there was a lot of thinking involved. And when I say a lot, I mean A LOT!! So by the end, I knew more than I knew before which is important. And the door also looked pretty cool….. until one day, the whole entire paper, all of the shapes and everything, just flopped right of the door. It was pretty depressing. Anyway, that’s not the point. I learned more about surface area than I ever had during this project and I also learned how to think outside of the box a little bit, I never would have thought to cut open the shapes if it wasn’t for this project. Who knew you could learn so much by covering a door completely in paper shapes. Definitely not me!

~ Jordyn 😁