Sports bag

This task is designed to assess how well students understand using a description to draw the net of a shape.

The task is to draw the net of a sports bag with the following features:

• The length of the bag will be 60 cm.
• The bag will have circular ends of diameter 25 cm.
• The main body of the bag will be made from 3 pieces of material; a piece for the curved body, and the two circular end pieces.
• Each piece will need to have an extra 2 cm all around it for a seam, so that the pieces may be stitched together.

An extension task asks: what is the minimum length of cloth that must be cut from a 1m wide roll in order to make the bag?

This task is from the Mathematics Assessment Resource Service, a collaboration between UC Berkeley and the Shell Centre team at the University of Nottingham. A full rubric is given for the task, together with examples of student work and suggestions for helping students overcome misconceptions. Further information on the collection is given here.