Monday, April 9, 2012

Shape Areas

Today I thought it would be a good idea to discuss how my mind works when I'm finding the area of various shapes. With any shape there is always another shape inside of it. A square is easy to find the area of you just multiply the length and the width. Exact same equation with a parrallelogram. A triangle is the exact same you just divide by 2. But what about with a trapezoid or a hexagon? is there a formula that we can use to make sense of these areas? or can we wing it in another way to find the area by manipulating the shape itself.

The answer is yes. You can manipulate any shape into multiple different shapes that you do know the equation for. For example break a hexagon into 6 triangles or 2 trapezoids. This website provides a small window into the world of shape areas and I encourage you to take a closer look to see what you can learn. As you scroll closer to the bottom it will start to explain some of the things I am talking about

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