Eighth grade students William, Alysa and Grady are taking a high school level Geometry course. They recently just finished up a large unit in which they studied over 50 vocabulary words! As a culminating project they created 2D nets from 3D shapes and calculated surface area and volume and researched different professions that use these calculations. After assembly they presented their projects to parents, faculty and students in a science fair style set-up and fielded a variety of questions such “What is a Platonic Solid?”  “What is the difference between a prism and a pyramid?” What does the capital P and B in the surface area formula mean?”

One of William’s favorite takeaways from completing this project was learning how chefs use surface area to calculate how fast a meal cooks. The higher the surface area to volume ratio, the faster something will cook. He also learned that mechanical engineers use surface area to manage heat dissipation. When something with low surface area is hot, it will stay hot for longer because the heat has less room to escape to the air. However, when something with lots of surface area is hot, it will cool down quicker because the heat has more places to escape into the air. Alysa enjoyed learning how origami is an everyday application to geometry. In Grady’s research he learned if an object cannot fit in a spacecraft the engineers will fold up the object and then it can be unfolded again once in space. The James Webb space telescope is an example of this. 

Today was a wonderful opportunity for the Geometry students to share their knowledge with their peers. Fellow classmates expressed how impressed they were with their classmate’s hard work and final presentations.