[Act 1] Pillar problem + going outside

Man...  no matter how hard I try, time seems to be fleeting when I have more responsibilities than usual.

Here's a short post since I miss spending time on this :)

So there's this interesting pillar close to the entrance of our school:

So... the questions naturally flow in.  What is it for?  what is the volume of this thing?  how much concrete or rock do we need for this?  can we fit a person inside that hole?

These types of questions were exactly the questions that my class came up with as well.  I actually did a lot of asking around to find out where this was from.  It turns out that these (there are 2 of them) used to be pillars which held up a giant log that prevented construction trucks from coming through.  There used to be a lot of construction around the area.  Time passed on, and the log started to rot, so the city removed it before it became a hazard.  For a long time, this weird shape became the symbol of the community.  Now it is no longer a symbol for the community, but it remains as an artifact and no one removed it.

I am new to the area and new to the school, so when I first saw this weird thing it definitely intrigued me.

In any case, our class had excellent discussions.  I let them to think about:

1. what would we need to find out the answers that we want? (volume + surface area)

2. what is the best way to measure this?

3. what kind of calculations would we need?

We did lots of planning inside the class.  Each group came up with an idea as to what to do.

Then we went outside and did it:

I took more pictures, but I only provided this one.  I am still a bit concerned about privacy and whatnot, so I had to carefully pick a picture like the above.

After we went outside, we came back and finished up our calculations.

All in all, it was great fun :)

On the next day I also talked about other methods that we could have done this.  Using a picture and using the idea of scaling, for example.

Note the umbrella...  I brought in the umbrella the next day so we did measurements with that as well.

The best part about this activity was definitely going outside (for them and for me).  And it was exciting to come up with answers that were extremely similar between the groups (with some help from me).