Tuesday 15 November 2011

Making 3D shapes!


This is a display made by year 10 students learning about the surface area and volume of prisms, cones and spheres! This quickly moves from cuboids that are quite approachable to shapes with curved surface areas likes cones and spheres. We had particularly good fun making cones (follow link for more details). The challenge was to make a cone with a base radius of 10cm and a perpendicular height of 24 cm. Students were given an A2 piece of card and those measurements. Firstly they had to figure out what the net of a cone looks like then figure out what the measurements needed to be to make sure the cone met its requirements! There is no substitute for having to build shapes from nets to help understand how the net relates to the shape. By mistake, one group made a fabulous 'Bar of Gold' shape which is a truncated rectangular based pyramid. Anyone know another name? Some students discovered 'antiprisms' and one group made a beautiful shape that we dont yet know the name of - see the picture below. A special mention is reserved for the students who printed the proof of the surface area of a cone on the T-Shirt (one for the display and one for me)! Great, practical, investigative fun all round!

The unnamed shape!
Some more photos of our display below.

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