Activity (Hands-On)Grades 6 - 9
A Place in Space
The 3D coordinate system.
Student groups use a "real" 3D coordinate system to plot points in space. Made from balsa wood or wooden dowels, the system has three axes at right angles and a plane (the XY plane) that can slide up and down the Z axis. Students are given several coordinates and asked to find these points in space. Then they find the coordinates of the eight corners of a box/cube with given dimensions.
Engineers use a coordinate system whenever they create engineering drawings of objects and structures, and the Cartesian coordinate system modeled in this activity is used most often.
After this activity, students shold be able to:
- Locate a point in space, given its coordinates and an origin.
- Describe the location of a given point in space relative to some origin using coordinates.