Building Silos

This rich task from Cre8ate offers pupils the opportunity to develop their personal learning and thinking skills. It involves using recycled materials to construct a scale model of a silo and is well suited to group work. The task can be extended for more able students by investigating the resizing of their model to accommodate an increased capacity.

Topics covered by this task include scale, ratio, measurement, volume of cylinders, unit conversions, graphs and substitution into formulae.

URL: http://stem.org.uk/rx4u

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Review

Good for building

Posted by cooky1 on 17th April 2012

Activity time: 2 hours

Level/prior knowledge: KS3/scale, ratio

Subject/curriculum…

Activity time: 2 hours

Level/prior knowledge: KS3/scale, ratio

Subject/curriculum links/skills: Maths/scale & ratio, volume of a cylinder, measurement, conversions, graphs, substitution into formulae/team work

Preparation time: time needed to gather resources

Extra resources: scissors, sticky tape, plastic drinks bottles, pupil worksheets, teacher notes, exercise books, calculators, pen/pencil

Commentary: This resource was used over two 1 hour lessons. The objectives were: to work out the scale factor of their individual drinks bottles, to construct a model silo and how would they change the design of the silo to hold an extra amount of grain. Before the lesson I had gathered various photographs of silos and made them into a powerpoint. The powerpoint was used at the beginning of the lesson and the following questions were asked: What is this? Where have you seen such structures? etc The pupils presented their finished work in groups with a poster detailing the maths they used, problems encountered and how they solved the problems. The pupils were assessed on their presentation, construction, teamwork and communication skills.