Building Bridges

Over the past week our class has been building bridges made out of bristle board. There was a lot of steps to this. First we had to choose what style of truss to use, there was a lot of people who chose he double warren truss.

The next step was to make a plan of what strips of bristle board we needed to make our trusses out of. After everyone was done making a plan, we all had to construct our trusses. This was the hardest step because one, we needed to hole punch the pieces, fasten them together, and make our roads.

Finally after we were all done our bridges we had to see which bridge could hold the most Lego pieces. The bridge that could hold the most pieces was able to hold 180 pieces.

Geometric "Guess Who"

For our Explore today, we played a fun variation of a very familiar game. Everyone knows how to play the game Guess Who?, and the skills involved were a perfect fit for the math lesson we were doing.

The students looked at a picture featuring many geometric shapes and chose one in their mind. Their partners then had to take turns asking "yes" or "no" questions of their partner until they correctly guessed the shape they were thinking of. Instead of asking about hair colour and whether they were wearing a hat or not, they had to base their questions on the attributes of the shapes. For instance, they had to ask questions about how many sides or vertices there were, parrallel or perpendicular lines, whether the angles were right, acute, or obtuse, or whether it had a line of symmetry.

Shape H, for example, is a six-sided shape (Hexagon) with 4 obtuse angles and 2 acute angles, it has 3 pairs of parrallel lines, no perpendicular lines, and one line of symmetry.

The students had a great time trying to stump their partners, proving once again that games can make any task educational and engaging!