From: Gail (for Teacher2Teacher Service)
Date: Mar 30, 2008 at 07:36:07
Subject: Re: Scale factor

Hi Anne,

Have you considered having students transfer a drawing, like a cartoon, from
one grid to another, using the size of the grid squares to teach about scale
factor? My students really enjoy that. I would start by brining in comics
from the newspaper, and having them choose a character to dilate. Then have
them draw a grid of 1 cm by 1 cm over their character. This is usually pretty
easy to do if you have them glue the character onto a plain sheet of paper.
You could also have them glue in onto a sheet of 1 cm by 1 cm grid paper, and
just connect the lines across the figure.

Then they should prepare another sheet of grid paper (or you can hove one
ready for them) in which the grid is a scale factor larger (smaller is
difficult, but it could be done) than the original, for example, 2 cm by
2 cm, or 3 cm by 3 cm.  Students should carefully copy what is in each
square of the original grid into the new grid, and when they are finished,
they will have a scaled model of the original.

I hope this gives you an idea to start with.

 -Gail, for the T2T service

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