Volume and area in engineering
A collection of resources to provide ideas for setting volume and area in the context of engineering, together with materials to support teaching of these topics.
'Sewage tunnels' challenges students to use their mathematical skills to calculate the dimensions of a tunnel. This activity provides a context for work on volume of a cylinder, volume of a cone, area of a circle and surface area of a cone.
There are two supporting resources. 'Area, Perimeter, and Volume' provides teaching resources covering area and perimeter, along with volume and surface area.' The 'Keeping Baby Warm' activity investigates the ratio of surface area to volume in adults and babies and explains why we keep babies wrapped up in winter.
Sewage tunnels
This activity challenges students to use their mathematical skills to calculate the critical dimensions of a sewage tunnel. The emphasis on how the development will affect the quality of life and how it could be realised. The activity challenges students to move beyond an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ approach to sewage as they use and develop their mathematical process skills within the real-world contexts presented. This activity provides a context for work on volume a cylinder, volume of a cone, area of a circle and surface area of a cone.
Heat Loss from Buildings
This engineering resource asks the question: how can the most efficient design be determined, taking both building and running costs into account?
The introduction considers the thermal conductivity of different materials graphically to help decide which material should be used. There follows an explanation of the concept of kilowatt hours. A video accompanies the resource explaining thermal conductivity.
The mathematics covered in this activity includes working with formulae for the area and perimeter of plane shapes, along with formulae for surface areas and volumes of regular solids.
Keeping Baby Warm
This activity investigates the ratio of surface area to volume in adults and babies and explains why we keep babies wrapped up in winter.To calculate surface area and volume students make scale models of a baby and an adult. This is activity fits between teaching these topics and working on the Sewage Tunnels activity.
Area, Perimeter and Volume
'Area, Perimeter and Volume' covers: areas and perimeters of shapes, along with surface area and volume of 3D shapes including the cube, cylinder and prism. This resource could be used prior to students working on the 'Sewage tunnels' activity.
