Creating 3D shapes

On Saturday 5th October Mr Johnson assisted by four Year 13 Mathematics students delivered a series of fun, challenging and engaging Maths activities aimed at able Year 5 to 7 pupils from schools across the North West. Through this Saturday Challenge young people undertook a range of activities:

Exploring three-dimensional shapes

Do you know the difference between a prism and a pyramid? What about the difference between a cube and a hexahedron? 

This session enhanced and extended participants’ understanding of three-dimensional shapes, discovering the Platonic solids and investigating the relationship between faces, vertices and edges.  By extending two-dimensional tessellations into three dimensions, we created tetrahedrons, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons and icosahedrons using a variety of paper techniques.

Students created amazing 3D shapes

Finding the centres of a triangle

In the afternoon participants were able to discover how to find three of the four different centres of a triangle, each found using a different technique.  We used ICT to model how to find each centre before the young people had a go themselves using paper, pencil and straight edge.  The teams also considered the practical applications of each centre to areas as diverse as engineering and town planning.