Taking to a Task

Luke Mitchell

Teacher - VCAL Numeracy

VCAL students were assigned a task to design the floor plan of a house using skills and understanding of measurement, basic shapes, and ratios. 

Once their floor plan was complete, the students used their measurements to create a 3-dimensional version of their floorplan to a ratio of their choice.  Exercising their mathematical skills, students were required to translate their measurements according to the chosen ratio,  and to employ these 'new' measurements when adapting the materials to build their model. These measurements were also used when solving problems - like applying specific mathematical equations when calculating the amount of surface area that will need to be painted on the project.

Students easily identify that  by using these skills, they are  able to develop a budget for the building and material costs when renovating or purchasing a home. By applying their learning in this way,  students can see how their learning directly impacts in 'real world' situations.  

Using their numeracy skills across a variety of projects like this one further enables students to exercise and enhance their approach to everyday tasks such as household budgeting and banking etc as well as their approach to work-related tasks that require numeracy skills.

 Student responses:

 We created a real-life mini version of our floor plan. We had to calculate measurements of the walls, floors and ceilings, how much paint we would need for the project etc. We also had to calculate costs of everything. This will help us in real life if we ever come across renovating our house, or maybe if we wanted to build our own house too. It will also help us in the future if we need to budget for things like this and calculating costs. 

It was a fun project because we got to build the mini house using a hot glue gun and popsicle sticks to construct it!   Some things I have learned from this project include how to use ratios, measurement conversions, and area calculations. This task required logical thinking about how many sticks to use, cutting skills, safety and appropriate use of a hot glue gun, as well as teamwork with sharing ideas for how to build the 3D model.