The door is a bore no more…… this was the title of the project we were assigned in math.  The door was split into five sections, one for each group. The goal of the project was to increase the surface area of our group’s section of the door by five times. My group was Jason, Kiera, Ben, and me.

Planning & Construction

We originally sketched out rectangular prisms but when we got the paper we thought it would be way to big to fit on the door. Jason then came up with the idea to make our whole project scaled down by half. We all agreed that it was a good idea. We then figured out all our calculations and began construction.

We had divided up the tasks so everyone had a role. Kiera and Jason were in charge of drawing the nets and cutting them out, Ben would put the nets together, and I would put them on the door. However we each helped with some of the other tasks.

Technical Report

After the long process we moved onto our technical report. We found most of it pretty easy to fill out and we were 1% above our goal for the surface area. However when we got into the stage explaining all of our calculations and how we got our answer we all sort of blanked. We had basically forgotten what we did and our calculations sheet was very unclear. After struggling through many drafts we decided on a final one.

Restarting

After showing our technical report to Mrs. Klausen, she pointed out the fact that we hadn’t completed the project properly because we weren’t increasing our surface area by five. Because we had scaled it down we were actually making the whole thing smaller. We had to go back to our original plans with two days until the project had to be done. So we got lots more paper and started again. Although it was really frustrating to do all that for nothing it taught me that I should always check in with a teacher throughout a process, and to fully read through a criteria. We managed to finish making the shapes by the middle of our second block after restarting. It was a relief to have that out of the way, but then we had to go back to our technical report which took a long time before. Luckily for us we weren’t the only people rushing to finish the project so we were able to get it done without being late for a due date.

Looking Back

If I was given this project again I would take a completely different angle by using different shapes, double checking all calculations, and READING THE CRITERIA! One of the biggest things I learned was thinking outside of the box, even though I would use different shapes next time, our group thought outside of the box to use rectangular prisms for the extra face, meaning we didn’t need as many shapes. I also obviously learned all of the math formulas. Even though it became very stressful and frustrating at some points this was a really fun project and it taught me a lot.