Do you ever look at your door and think, ‘It’s too small,’? Well, we have a solution for you. Simply cover your door with 3D shapes to make its overall surface area 5 times bigger! If you have 20 students, split the door into 5 sections and make groups of 4. That way they each have a part of the door to cover.
To cover your door, you will need:
- Paper
- More paper
- A LOT more paper
- Mathematical skills
- Teamwork
- A LOT of tape
- More tape
- Creative children
You can use several shapes, including pyramids, cylinders, rectangular prisms, and maybe an icosahedron if you’re feeling lucky.
The completed door
The entire door was covered
My group, consisting of me, Kyle, Aedan, and Taylor had the job of covering the bottom left corner. We decided to mostly use square pyramids, but part of the project criteria was to include other shapes as well, like rectangular prisms, cubes, and cylinders. We left extra space so we could count it in the tally of surface area. However, we were a few square centimetres under the total we needed. We didn’t really know what to do to cover that little bit until Aedan came up with the great idea to add small cubes to the vertices of the square pyramids, so we could count all of their surface area. This project was super enjoyable, because we got to control how we wanted to do the project. It also taught me that the right way may not be the one that you see first.
I really enjoyed this project, and I hope I can do more like it in the future.