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These resources have been reviewed and selected by STEM Learning’s team of education specialists for factual accuracy and relevance to teaching STEM subjects in UK schools.

Prisms

This interactive excel file shows how the volume of a prism relates to the area of cross section and the length. Various different shapes of cross section are used including pentagons, hexagons, circles and semicircles. In each interactive sheet the cross section can be seen to move through the length of the prism. The area of the different cross sections can be found and the volume calculated. For some of the cross sections trigonometry or Pythagoras Theorem is needed in order to calculate the area.

There is an interactive sheet of questions where two values are given for a number of different prisms and the other values need to be calculated. Correct answers can be revealed.

There are seven further sheets of questions on related topics which could be duplicated for classroom use.

Note
This program was designed by be viewed on a screen with a resolution of 1024 x 768. Users may have to adjust the resolution of their screen for the pages to display as was originally intended. The program uses macros which need to be enabled on users’ machine.

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