How Big? Necessary Area & Volume for Shelter
How much cavern space is needed to shelter Alabraska citizens during and after the asteroid impact?Copyright Anne Arundel County, MD http://www.aacounty.org/OEM
Continuing the Asteroid Impact challenge, student teams get good practice in area and volume calculations as they determine the size of the caverns necessary to protect the population of the state of Alabraska from the impending (hypothetical!) asteroid impact. They measure their classroom to determine overall area and volume, determine how many people the space could comfortably sleep, and then scale up their numbers to find the necessary area to house all Alabraskan citizens. They work through problems on a worksheet and perform math conversions between feet/meters and miles/kilometers.
Engineering teams begin the design process by thoroughly defining the problem at hand. This process involves identifying, through group brainstorming, discussion and research, the technical, financial and social criteria for successful design. When designing underground spaces, civil, mining and architectural engineers perform analyses that are similar to what students do in this activity to determine the appropriate space requirements.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Measure length, width and height of a room using a tape measure or ruler.
- Calculate area and volume from length, width and height measurements.
- Convert simple English units to metric units.
- Determine proportion by comparing a smaller area to a larger area.
- Represent a measurement on graph paper.