Rovers - 5th Grade GT Math
Combining many math standards, we put our engineering skills in action and built Mars rovers to honor NASA's Curiosity. We discovered how to work with fractions, decimals, measurement, ratio and proportion using hands-on discovery learning. We had a lot of fun and learned many things along the way!
Curiosity Has Landed - First we went to the lab to learn about the Curiosity Rover, mapping out its features and seeing where the math fit in.
Designing Our Own Rovers - After learning about the real Curiosity Rover, we went home to design our own idea of a rover.
Time to Build! - We worked in partners to construct a rover that could carry the payload of a 9 oz. plastic cup.
Testing Rovers & Taking Data - When it was time to test the design of each of our rovers, we headed to the smooth floor of the cafeteria and rolled our rovers down a ramp. We used a meter stick to measure the distance rolled and then worked with the metric system to learn about conversion within the system as well as between decimals and fractions.
Blueprints - Once all of our ramp data was collected, it was time to take some measurements of our actual rover to draw up a blueprint to submit to the Crazy Crater Crate Construction Company. We used the concept of scale drawings to draft a proportionate blueprint drawing of each of our rovers.
Each of the tasks involved a lot of mathematical computation of rational numbers.
Crate Concepts - In order to construct a crate for our rovers, we first needed to understand a thing or two about surface area of three-dimensional figures. After all, we need to know how much board it will take to construct our rover crates. Once we understood the make-up of the formula for surface area of a rectangular prism, we understood how the net of the crate had to be designed using the dimensions we had taken of our rovers. Math application is best when FUN!!! We got to use our measuring, calculating fractions, and geometry skills to successfully build our rover crates.
TADA!!! Time to ship them for launch! We've learned so much along the way!