Grade 10 is all about balance

We learned that the balance point, or center of gravity of a triangle is the exact point where the medians intersect.  We are good at finding intersection points, and we are still working on medians, so today we gave it all a try.

For some groups we noticed that there certainly were a lot of steps, and without care, it is easy to get lost!  It’s sometimes hard to find errors at the end of a problem.  We worked through the solution checking each step to see if what we calculated was reasonable.  Our method was a graphical one.

At the end of this exercise we learned that there’s a bit of a shortcut to finding the center of gravity of a triangle….we can average the 3 x values and 3 y values of the corner points, and the result will be the same as if we go through the process of finding medians and then substituting.