Converting Square and Cube Units

Our goal in MFM2P is that we will be able to convert square and cube units. We are slowly working on making sense of squares and cubes. We did a day of making squares and cubes on Thursday, and we revisited that today and made the transition from the concrete to the visual and then to the abstract.

We know that when the exponent is 2 we have a square, and when the exponent is 3 we have a cube. We know that what the exponent touches, either the x or the brackets, indicates the side length of the cube or square.

We next looked at a progression of questions involving drawing and reasoning about various cubes and squares.

We drew diagrams and looked at areas and volumes

We needed to remember prior knowledge of nets, and add to it ideas from when we built our models out of toothpicks.

This led us to talking about how many square centimetres are in a square metre, which we can think of as (100cm)^2 since a meter has 100cm. We need to now understand that it’s 100cm by 100cm so the area is 10000cm^2.

We’ll do some more examples over the coming days during “algebra” and reconnect back to this again when we do volume and surface area calculations later on for “measurement and geometry”. Spiralling through a course allows for many chances to touch on the same material and review or solidify understanding.