- Explain your process.
- We analyzed the mental image of a soccer ball, and decided to create a series of pentagons that we would then attach to each other to make the sphere.
- We made a base of one pentagon, and then attempted to add five pentagons (one per side), taking a way the overlapping edges as we go along.
- This proved to be inefficient. The structure was not strong enough to stay up by itself, and we didn’t have enough time to resolve a problem with this prototype. So, upon realizing that combining and molding the marshmallows together we could make a ball, that’s what we did. We picked up the remaining marshmallows, rolled them together, and enforced the ball by putting in small pieces of raw spaghetti.
- What did you learn/change?
- We learned that our structure wasn’t stable or strong enough to stay up by itself, so we resolved that the next time we had to create a soccer ball out of marshmallows and raw spaghetti, we would reinforce each side of the pentagon with two layers of spaghetti instead of just one.
- As a direct result of this problem, we resolved that we would abandon our current prototype and instead form all the available marshmallows into a ball, thus creating a soccer ball. This was also due to lack of time available in creating the soccer ball.
- We learned that we are not the most experienced when it comes to creating spheres with the materials available, even though we have used them to make prisms since elementary school.
- How is this a math problem?
- It involves a lot of geometry, regarding the actual properties of a soccerball.
- Despite not actually doing any calculations, it’s probably a math problem. Anything is a math problem if you look hard enough.
After the video, we figured that our main problem lied in making the whole shape out of pentagons, while in reality, a soccer ball is made out of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons.