Day 7 - Optimizing Rectangular Prisms

Today we optimized 3-dimensional shapes. Today we only tackled the rectangular prism:

I was happy to get back to an activity with this class. Activities, especially hands-on with manipulatives work better with this group for sure!  Also, getting them to understand how to make multiple prisms with a volume of 48 cubic units would be impossible without the linking cubes. While groups did not make all their prisms with the cubes, they almost all started the activity with them.  Some student work:

Finding the surface area was trickier than I thought it would be, but I was missing a few students yesterday and the students who missed finding the surface area and volume of composite shapes yesterday definitely had a harder time. Because students had done a similar activity with 2-D shapes, the graphing was much easier:

They definitely came away with the idea that a cube will make the optimal shape, which was the important idea of the day!