This week of math class, I’ve learned how to find the volume and the surface area of prisms, cones, pyramids and spheres, as well as learned some new formulas that I can utilize.

Here I am looking for the volume and surface area of a prism. In this example, I needed to use Pythagorean Theorem because the height length was not given to find the area of the triangular base. The whole idea of Surface Area for prisms is to add all the areas of the surfaces/faces. It’s different for cylinders, cones, spheres and pyramids, instead they each have their own formula:

The most challenging part about learning this lesson was finding the Surface Area because it requires a lot of steps and you can accidentally make a small mistake which changes the answer completely. For example, sometimes I would accidentally add the same side of the shape twice or consider the slant height as the height.

There has been quite a few things I’ve learned from Imperial and SI systems. I’ve learned more different conversions in measurements such as converting from feet to miles and meters to yards as well as how to apply them to real life situations. I’ve learned how to do conversions when it includes more than one type of measurement like 2 mi 325 yds to yards. I’ve also learned how to read a vernier caliper in Imperial and metric units and how to read a micrometer in metric units.

When you are given multiple measurements, sometimes you have to do multiple conversions because some of the conversions are not given. For example meters to feet. You have to go through multiple conversions, meters to centimeters then to feet.

The challenges I came across was the problem solving questions because I had a hard time applying the necessary measurements and what to do. It took some time to solve some of them but I managed to figure them out, although I still need some practice.