Measure to Measure

Objective: Students familiarize themselves with various engineering measurements (length, area, volume, mass/weight, density) in the exploration of an engineering optimization problem (maximization of volume).

Materials: Each student will need

  • Scissors
  • Heavy Tape (masking or packing)
  • Thin-line marker or marking pen
  • 4 sheets of 8.5 x 11 card stock paper, imprinted with a graph-paper grid of 1 cm x 1 cm squares
  • Web browser connection to the Volume Applet
  • Web browser connection to the Data Graphing Applet

The exercise also requires

  • Kitchen scale (5lb/2kg or 25lb/10kg)
  • Sand (~4 lbs)
  • Marbles (~4 lbs)


Web lesson to be posted


Developed by Dr. Garrett R. Love for
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