I measure my school... I measure my world

Hi everyone!

Today, I'm here to show you a new challenge you can do with your students. Are you ready??

In this challenge, students would have to measure their school! I think that they would be really interested and motivated with this activity. What do you think?

First of all, we have to decide what we want that students measure, for example: the playground, a class, the hall... whatever we want to. The challenge is that students have to draw a reduction scale plan of what they have measured. So... we have to explain to them how to do it. 

Depending on the measure of the place we have selected, the scale would be different, but I recommend you to do an example with the students, like this one:

We have a class that measures 10 metres long and 4 metres wide. We want to represent it on an A4 sheet of paper, so, I need to know its measurements: 29,7 centimetres long and 21 centimetres wide. 

Now so as to have all the data in the same unit, we change the 10 metres long and 4 metres wide of the class to centimetres: 10000 cm x 400 cm. We want to draw this in the sheet of paper, but we don't have enough space to do it, so... let's do a reduction scale!

We have to think about how much we want to reduce our original space. In this case, we are going to try to divide it by 20, and our scale would be 1:20. It means that a centimetre in the scale would be 20 centimetres in the real life. If we do that, we'd have 10000:20, that would be 50 cm, and 400:20, that would be 20 cm. As you can see, this is not useful for us, because this space wouldn't fix in our sheet of paper:

We cannot draw 50x20 cm in a sheet of 29,7x21 cm

So, we have to continue trying scales so as to find one useful for drawing this classroom... we have to reduce it more, so we would try 1:30, 1:40... until we find the good one! Are you ready to put into practice this game with the students? I'm sure they'll love it... you can do it helping them, and little by little, they will be able to do it by themselves. 

But... first of all, don't you think that we should explain to the students the concept of scale? Here, we have a video in Spanish that could be really useful for teaching this concept!

I hope you'll like this post... if you have some recommendations, feel free to comment!!

Bye bye!! 😽