Believe it or not this is my first math post of the year! So let’s not waste time, and get into it right away. This post is going to be all about this project that we did called Ideal Angles. The bottom line was we were supposed to find the “ideal angle” of a solar panel for a certain time, place, season and weather. On top of that we had to build a house that could scale properly to an actual sized house, we also had to have a little write up to explain our thought process.

By now you might be thinking, how could you possibly figure all that out? One word… Trigonometry. Throughout the beginning of the school year we learned all about trigonometry, angles and triangles. This helped us in the long run with our projects by helping us figure out all the angles on our house and the angle of out solar panel!

Before we got started with our project we did a little lab. This lab basically did exactly what we needed to do for our project, but with a light bulb instead of a sun. So for the lab we just took some wooden blocks, wooden planks, solar panels and a voltmeter (something that can measure volts) This labs goal was to find the ultimate angle for a solar panel, so to do this we had to take the plank of wood and put it on top of one block of wood. We than took a solar panel and taped it on top, next we measured the amount of energy it was taking for the sun using a voltmeter. The last step was recording the info (length, energy, height) so we could use trigonometry to figure out our idea angle. We kept repeating this process, and putting one more block underneath the plank of wood each time, until we hit the peak of energy. Once we hit that peak we could figure out the ideal angle with our info we recorded using trigonometry.
Look at the picture below to follow along with my thought process!

Back to the project! So before any project we do we have to make a draft. For my draft I created a little drawing of my plan including the season, weather, date and proportions of my house. Take a look!

After finishing my drafts it was time to actually start thinking about my project, and the math that was going to be involved. Since we didn’t have any other angles to find our ideal angle, I had to first find the angle of the sun. Once I found the angle of the sun I could keep moving forward and use that to figure out the angle of the solar panel by also using the lengths and heights of the house! I think it would be easier to show you what I did instead of attempting to tell you, so take a look at the picture below!

Now that I had all the math figured out it was time to start building. I grabbed a piece of wood for the bottom, and some cardboard for the ceiling and roof. I had to also keep in mind that everything had to be measured precisely or the measurements wouldn’t add up. So once I finished glueing the ruff structure of the house, I started to put some personalization into it. The final touch was the light, I decided to add a simple circuit inside the house to get a scaled down perspective of how much energy it actually takes to light up a house. Overall I was really proud of my work and happy with how it turned out! I’ll add the rubric, write up and the final product below:

This project really helped my grasp the idea of trigonometry. Although I did understand everything beforehand, I really did get a deeper understanding of the big idea. I think this was also a very interesting project because it got us kind of aware of how much energy is needed, and amount of time is put into clean living. During the research I also learned a lot about the environmental factor of everything and how beneficial it can really be for the environment! Overall this project really incorporated lots of learning, and I thought the outcome was great!