Yesterday afternoon I saw a really neat tweet from Kathy Henderson:
It immediately reminded me of our projects on the volume of a pyramid and a tetrahedron from a few weeks ago:
Studying Tetrahedrons and Pyrmaids
Comparing a tetrahedron and a pyramid and experiment
We had a hard time finding the volume of the pyramid and tetrahedron by filling them with water because, despite our best efforts with tape, our shapes were not even close to water tight. They were definitely “popcorn tight” though, so we *had* to try out this activity.
Kathy was nice enough to share the handout she used, so designing today’s project was a piece of cake:
So, I had the boys make the shape’s prior to filming – we started the project with a quick discussion of the construction of the shapes. Then we talked about their volume.
My older son thought the volumes would be roughly the same. My younger son thought the one with the rectangular base would have the largest volume.
Next we tried to calculate the area of the base of each prism. Rather than using graph paper as the handout suggested, we found the area of each base by measuring. That gave us a chance for a little arithmetic and geometry practice, too.
Next we went to the kitchen scale to measure the change in weight when we filled the shapes with popcorn kernels. We found *very roughly* the relationship we were expecting, which was nice!
Finally, we revisited the pyramid and the tetrahedron project and looked at the two different volumes using popcorn. We found the ratio of the volumes was roughly 1.96 rather than the 1.7 to 1.8 ratio we found using water.
This is such a great project and I’m super happy that Kathy Henderson shared it yesterday. Working through the project you get to play with ideas from arithmetic and geometry. With a larger group you probably also get to discuss why everyone (presumably) found slightly different volumes.
So, a fun project that was relatively easy to implement. What a great start to the weekend 🙂
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