The students make a drawing to find the area of a home office and explain its meaning.
Episode Supports
Students’ Conceptual Challenges
In this episode, Mauricio and Emily are tasked with creating and using a drawing to find the area of a room. While they are able to draw a rectangle and label its dimensions, they use the area formula to find the area, rather than their drawing. This illustrates the difficulty students may have setting aside previously-learned formulas in favor of reasoning with non-symbolic representations. The pair eventually add to their drawing and use it to support their initial finding of an area of 80 ft2.
Focus Questions
For use in a classroom, pause the video and ask these questions:
[Pause the video at 1:58] Before watching further, try this task for yourself. Create a drawing of a room that is 10 ft long and 8 ft wide. Use your drawing to find the area of this room and label each part of your drawing with appropriate labels and units.
[Pause the video at 7:45] Compare your drawing with the one created by Mauricio and Emily. What similarities and differences do you notice? Did you use the same labels and units?
Supporting Dialogue
[Pause the video at 4:39] Tell your partner what you would say to Emily and Mauricio to help them use their drawing, and not the formula, for finding the area of this room. What is the difference between using the formula and using a drawing when finding the area of a rectangle?
MathTalk