NRICH Perimeter, Area and Volume Key Stage 4
This list supports teaching of perimeter, area and volume in secondary mathematics. It provides investigations, problems and games from NRICH as well as classroom activities on the STEM Learning website that compliment them.
Here are some favourite activities selected by the NRICH team.
- Track Design This activity investigates designing running track for a new Olympic stadium, subject to a list of constraints.
- Curvy Areas A pattern is made using overlapping semicircles inside a circle. The first challenge is to construct the pattern accurately. The next challenge is to calculate the proportion of each colour used in the design.
- Triangles and Petals An equilateral triangle is rotated around another equilateral triangle to produce a flower with three petals. The first challenge is to calculate the perimeter of the flower's petals. The challenge develops by rotating an equilateral triangle around other polygons.
These are just a few of the activities on Perimeter, area and volume that you can find on the NRICH curriculum pages.
The activities below, taken from the STEM Learning website, complement the NRICH activities above.
Running Tracks
This Cre8ate maths activity is the perfect complement to the NRICH challenge 'Track Design'.
The activity covers accurate measurement, scale drawing and calculations involving pi. The materials can be used irrespective of whether there is access to a running track.
Circle Measurement
This resource is a helpful prelude to the NRICH 'Track Design' activity.
Circle measurement pack one from this SMILE resource contains nine work cards with a wide variety of activities covering finding the length of a running track and the circumference of a circle, naming different parts of a circle, and calculating the area of a circle.
Square and Circle Inquiry
This resource is ideal to use as a complement to the NRICH activity 'Curvy Areas'.
This resource from Inquiry Maths states "a square fits into a circle better than a circle fits into a square" leading to a rich task exploring areas, ratios and percentages.
There are full lesson notes for this resource that include suggested prompts for use in the classroom.
