
Students use our lego measurements to underestimate and over estimate this giant firefighter’s construction time and LEGO block quantity. Then students average their class estimates and compare to the real time and and quantity.
In time for Halloween, students assume that all of our pieces of chocolate are about the same thickness and proceed to approximate their volumes by comparing only their surface areas. Encourage them to create overlapping grids and count the fully and partially-covered cells or use the mean radius method.
In this activity students determine if this method for minimizing wrapping paper is actually more efficient then the traditional method. For a hands on learning experiment, have students actually wrap a small rectangular prism using any available paper in both the traditional and diagonal methods. Then let them compare the two quantities of wrapping paper and decide which method uses less paper and by what percent.
Just before Thanksgiving there are competitions all over the world to celebrate cool design, tricky engineering, and to donate a whole lot of food. How many cans does it take to build this structure? What information do you need to determine this? How did you determine your solution? What else did you notice that is mathematical?
First, students need to find the surface area that the M&Ms cover in order to approximate how many M&Ms she needs to finish her cake.
When Brian tried to make the cake, he mistakenly added too much peanut butter. Now all the of ingredients will need to be increased by some percent to insure that the cake maintains appropriate ingredient ratios?