Summary and Synthesis

In Tuesday's class we discussed area, perimeter, and scale factor. At first I thought the activity we did was really confusing but once my group started discussing it, I started to understand it and that made me really excited! I know I learned this information when I was younger but I must have completely forgot about it because at first I didn't have a clue what we were talking about. We discussed that if there are two similar objects and we increase the scale factor of the original object by two then the new area for the larger object is original area times two squared. If we increase the scale factor by 3, the new area is original area times three squared. Therefore, we found that the general rule for area in terms of scale factor is Area x's scale factor squared. I thought the way we did this activity was really beneficial to us students. It was a great hands-on experience; we got to actually use different manipulatives and create the new areas with the shapes. I think this is a much better way of learning the information than just reading about it in a textbook!