Math is Everywhere!

We are working towards our culminating task in grade 9, which involves exploring the math that we see in an image, or the math that the image inspires.

Today we debriefed the example that we tried on our quiz.

We talked about volume, area calculations and comparison. We talked about questions like “if you know the volumes are the same, and one radius is 3 times the other, how are the heights related”, we looked at classifying shapes by number of faces and showing that as a ratio, fraction, decimal, percent. We talked about how tall a tower we could build. We looked at Euler’s formula “faces + vertices=edges+2” and examined which solids fit that rule.

As a class, we then split up into groups and brainstormed questions we could ask about these images.

We had very creative ideas! Many students wanted to calculate volume of ice cream, or surface area of the cone, or look at the angles of the palm trees. Some wanted to fill the ferris wheel with ice cream and wondered about how many cones it would take. That led to another group wanting to fill the slide with ice cream! Lots of creative math to tackle.

We’ll keep working on creating mild/medium/spicy questions as we head toward our culminating task at the end of term.