Car Project - Day 2

Today was the second full day of working on the car project. Since I saw most students working with rectangular-shaped cars last class, I decided to challenge them to push beyond this traditional shape. I asked students how they knew that a rectangular-shaped car would work better than, say, a hexagonal-shaped car? With that, I let students work.

As I walked around, I could see that students were pushing themselves to look at different shapes. Some played around with pyramids, others with spheres and cylinders. Issues brought to the forefront included finding the area of a trapezoid and the surface area of a sphere.

As the day progressed, I could see that the design for many groups was evolving to elongated cylinders with spherical end-caps. This was good to see as these shapes produce the best volume-surface area ratios.

Next class, I am hoping to wrap up the work on the designs and have students build their scale models. Each student will write-up their findings and the final report will be due on Friday. The plan would be for students to turn in their write-up and then have each group present their final design.