Activities

 Activities

 Hands-on activity to find the area of a triangle:

• Make a geoboard from a sheet of pegboard, box of nuts and bolts.
• The bolts need to fit inside the holes on the pegboard.
• Make grid-lines through the holes on 12x12 inch pegboard.
• Push the bolts through all of the holes in the pegboard.
• Secure each of them to the board with the nuts.
• The top of the geoboard is the side with the protruding bolt ends.
• Place rubber bands on these bolt ends to make triangles on the geoboard.
• Determine the area of each triangle by counting the squares within the area of the rubber band.
• Measure the sides of the triangle using a ruler and calculate the actual area of the triangle by hand.
• Discuss whether this answer is an accurate approximation to the actual area of the triangle, and if not, why it could have been different to the actual area.