Introduction
This lesson is designed for middle school students to apply their area formulas to real life locations. Ideally, students would have learned and had some practice already with the different area formulas. This activity would give them some more practice with the formulas and also let the students see how these formulas can be applied in real life situations.
Instructions
For this lesson, students will have the freedom to choose a location that they find interesting. Students could pick their school, a city, a country, or have a more general theme, such as landmarks. Students will work in groups to find the area of at least five items on their map. For example, students could find the area of a local park in their neighborhood, the area of a city block, or the area of a body of water.
Each group will create a custom map and label the five places they found the area of. Students will be able to use the measure feature on My Maps, but they will need to use those measurements to find the entire area of the location.
Example
In my example below, I found the area of three locations on the University of Portland campus. I used the area of a circle to find the area of Chiles Center, the area of a rectangle to find the area of Merlo Field, and the area of a triangle to find the area of small patch of grass in the Academic Quad. Students will be expected to label the location with the area and the formula(s) they used.
Maddy, fantastic idea for integrating geography and math. It brings area computation into the real world. Reminds us that these large areas also need measurement to manage – for example – they have to manage the lawn on the quad. Knowing the area helps maintenance plan for supplies and allocating maintenance time. Excellent lesson!
Hi Maddy! I like how you incorporated math and geometry into your lesson! I think that this is a great way to get students to start applying the concept of area to real-world situations and is super fun and engaging.