Student Mobiles

Some ideas from the past

Student Mobile Projects

Students built a mobile to illustrate what they had learned throughout the year.

For the Fourth Marking Period project students were asked to build a mobile which illustrated ideas they had learned throughout the full year Geometry course. Each mobile was to contain 12 branches which illustrated the concept and then described the concept. Students were asked to include at least one idea from each of 10 chapters they had studied.

Using chapters 2-12 of Mike Serra's Discovering Geometry, by Key Curriculum, students sat down and recorded two new ideas that they learned in each chapter this year. Then decided how they were going to illustrate that idea and what they were going to write about the idea. The 11 chapters covered:

	Chapter 2: Geometric Relationships
	Chapter 3: Geometric Constructions
	Chapter 4: Triangle Properties
	Chapter 5: Polygon Properties
	Chapter 6: Circles
	Chapter 7: Transformations and Tessellations
	Chapter 8: Area
	Chapter 9: Pythagorean Theorem
	Chapter 10: Volume
	Chapter 11: Similarity
	Chapter 12: Trigonometry

Students used round crocheting rings,

plastic hangers, metal clothes hangers, and metal reinforcement rods for the main structure.

One student had difficulty getting her wooden rods to stay balanced and separated, so she incorporated a clothespin to hold then entire mobile together.

A student used stars at the bottom of each of her branches to make a celestial mobile. cardboard circles, wooden dowels with hangers,

One student used wooden dowels as the foundation for their mobiles. Students also used creativity in putting their mobiles together.

Students selected the two ideas which stood out in each chapter.

Another student illustrated her ideas with the Escher-Type Tessellation produced using the Sketchpad program. She duplicated a copy of this tessellation and then described it on one of the branches.

Some students decided to illustrate one of the ideas on Volume by building a net for a rectangular prism and a pyramid with the same base and height as the rectangular prism, cutting out the shapes and then nesting the two shapes inside each other.

A student used reinforcement rods, he welded together, as the base of his mobile. Ideas were hung from this base on white cards.

Another student used a base shape of a circle for his mobile and then illustrated and described the ideas he had learned on cylinders suspended from the circle.

On the day the projects were due each student was paired with another student. Each project had to be evaluated by another student. Students wrote down various characteristics they found in the mobile, they looked for mistakes other students had made, and they described things they liked about the mobile. Students were even able to suggest the grade the student should receive on the mobile.

set of directions

Updated on 08/26/09 .