Tag: volume

The Wet Iphone Task

We explored a problem related to volume and surface area with multiple solutions. But wasn’t one of them more right than the others?

–Updated April 2, 2021 to remove the Wet Phone task published originally in Middle Grades Geometry and Measurement (Steele, 2006). Our apologies to the author Michael Steele for posting your intellectual property.–

Cynthia started today’s meeting by saying that she would be sharing a problem from a recent workshop she attended on multiple solution tasks (MSTs). These problems are designed so that there are multiple correct solutions. In our math circle, we have grown accustomed to seeing multiple strategies for solving a problem, but usually there is one correct solution. Even after we saw different solutions later on, there was something nagging at me. Are they both equally correct? Really? Continue reading “The Wet Iphone Task”

Can you fit more boxes in a shipping container than Jane can?

Exploring some of the mathematics in packing a shipping container.

For today’s CAMI meeting, Mark was trying out a draft of a lesson that he wrote with Eric involving volume and units in a workplace context. The problem we explored involves trying to fit rectangular boxes into a shipping container.  Continue reading “Can you fit more boxes in a shipping container than Jane can?”

Growing Rectangles

This task, from Mathematical Mindsets, by Jo Boaler, asked us to explore how area and volume are affected when shapes are scaled up in size. For example, if you double the dimensions of a square, how is the area affected? What if you triple the dimensions?

We used this meeting to explore a problem from Mathematical Mindsets by Jo Boaler. I had worked on it a few weeks ago as part of an online book group with LINCS. I decided not to give out all the questions in the task at once, but you can look at the problem URL above to see the whole thing. Continue reading “Growing Rectangles”