Saw a fun tweet from Dan Anderson when I got up this morning:
Here’s a direct link to the CNN article:
The artificial glacier growing in the desert
The article is interesting all by itself, and the mathematical question Dan is asking was the subject of our project this morning.
First I asked the boys to read the article – here’s what they thought:
I was happy that the idea about the cone having the least surface area for a given volume came up when the boys were summarizing the article. We now moved on to investigating that question.
We first looked at a cube:
The calculations for the cube were pretty easy. Now we moved on to a slightly more complicated shape -> half of a sphere.
Working through the various volume and surface area formulas is a nice introductory algebra exercise for kids:
Now we moved on to looking at cones. Looking carefully at cones is quite a bit more complicated than looking at cubes or spheres. So, first we played with the formulas and reduced the surface area formula to one variable. We got that formula at the end of this movie:
The formula we found in the last video was a bit complicated, so we moved to Mathematica for a bit of help. The graph of the surface area for different values of radius of the cone is a shape that the boys haven’t seen before.
It was fun to talk about how this shape could be helpful in studying the question that Dan asked in the tweet.
It was also fun for me to hear how they thought about ways to zoom in on the minimum.
Definitely a fun project – would be especially good for a calculus class, I think.
Mike's Math Page 