Teaching Area of Irregular Shapes Using Architecture

I love looking at architecture. There's something so therapeutic about the symmetry. 

In this exercise your goal as the educator is to get students thinking about how to take an area of an irregular shape. The shapes that you will use are extremely advanced

So the goal is not for your students to take exact areas but to develop the thought process of how to approach such a problem.

Tell your students that they need to know how much paint to buy to paint the front of this house. How can they figure out the area? Print out the picture and have them spot as many regular shapes as possible in the picture, like so

From here we could get a close approximation of the area of the front of the house if we knew the measurements. 

Finding Area of Irregular Figures With Rubber Band Shapes

Teaching Area of Irregular Shapes Can Be Confusing For Students 

So, give them a ruler and some Rubber bands with shapes and let have some fun. The goal is not to present them with a testable question so much as to present them with a difficult question to which they must use known concepts. 

Be sure to ask them what strategy they used----->A teenagers mind is amazing!

Possible thoughts of a teenage mind --"Well, that tail on the fish thingy kind of looks like a triangle and his body is like a circle i guess"--

Hiring Your Students As FBI Agents (Cool Way to Teach Area and Circumference of Circles)

Let face it, circles are just not that exciting for math students, especially the area and circumference of circles. 


Let’s change this...

First, hire all your students as FBI agents

Next, they must begin working immediately, as there’s an emergency. Somewhere in the school (you may use town if you would like) is a bomb with a blast radius of 500 feet!

Our job is twofold: We need to know how far back the citizens need to stand to insure their safety (circumference of a circle). Second we need to know what type of damage we are looking at (area of circle).

Now, have them imagine if they were faced with job calculating such information of a nuclear weapon with a blast radius of  plus or minus a mile (Good reference sites for blast radius here and here)