Anna & Lucy

In this project, we chose a rectangular prism as our object.

We deconstructed a box that we found and used it for the project the steps above. The dimensions for the surface area and volume were from this box.

We found the Extension part of the project to be more difficult because the instructions were hard to interpret. Our method was to simply find the net of the object using any method, calculate the area of all sides and then add all the sides together.

This method is reliable as long as the object has faces/flat surfaces to measure. It may be more difficult for more complex 3D objects. since it might take longer to find the net and measure the dimensions of all the faces.

On the first image showed above, a diagram is shown of the net of our object. In the surface area calculations (step 4) we did not include the area of the extra flaps on the box, so we included the areas of those separately (shown in the table on left image). The calculations of the surface area of the box are shown on the image to the right.

If I was to do this project again, I would think of a better and more reliable method to find the surface area of any object. This method works but has restrictions.