Lessons from the Salvadori Classroom:
Mathematics

Each lesson plan is in PDF format. Select the lesson title to open the file.

• Bubble Your Home - You will be designing the program for your dream house and arranging it within its environment, or its "site," using Venn diagrams. Try to incorporate as many of your favorite activities as possible into a house with no more than 4,000 square feet.
• Cut To Fit - How do you think industrial designers (people who design the objects we use everyday at home, at school, and at play) communicate their design ideas to the factories that make the products? You are going to create shop drawings for a chair and from those drawings calculate how much it would cost to make this chair from wood.
• Dome Home - In building a geodesic dome for the class, we will go through three steps: 1) create the design of the geodesic dome, 2) build a scale model based on that design, and 3) using that model, build a geodesic dome large enough to hold the entire class!
• Form and Furniture - Measure the dimensions of your fellow group members as they are seated in their chairs. Use your measurements to design an ergonomic school chair and make a scale drawing of your design.
• A Lively Loaded Room - Your challenge is to think like an engineer in order to find out how much weight the floor of the classroom should be able to support without collapsing. In order to do this, you will need to estimate the actual live load of the classroom, then come up with a factor of safety to determine the design load (the actual amount of weight the floor can hold).
• Morphing The Room - Imagine that we had the chance to make our classroom bigger. Your challenge is to draw a plan for an addition to increase the area of our classroom by 50%.
• Ornament Your Home - Your challenge is to create a two-dimensional symmetrical ornament for your home. Start by learning about the different types of symmetry to help you find examples of symmetrical ornamentation in your environment. Then, experiment to create a symmetric ornament of your own.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us.