INTRODUCTORY PAPER

PROJECT DESCRIPTION
This project is aimed to provide each student with an understanding of the different
aspects of mathematics that are related to soccer balls. Students will explore the structure of a
soccer ball by using mathematical concepts. With this understanding, students will discover
the uniqueness of soccer balls. During this project, the students will work in groups to design
their own soccer ball model based on what they learn about mathematics through inquiry
learning. To evaluate the classs progress and understanding, every group will present what
they have been working on through an oral, formal presentation to their peers and parents.
The driving question of the project is: How can we build a soccer ball from scratch?
Our major goal at the end of the project is for students to know the mathematics behind the
creation of soccer ball. During this process, students will learn what makes a soccer ball, what
materials can be used in creating one, and what an effective soccer ball design looks like.
Students will be able to discover a relationship among vertices, edges, and faces of polygons,
discover what makes a platonic solid, identify, plot, and label points, axes, and quadrants on a
coordinate plane, construct regular pentagons and hexagons with a straightedge and compass,
find the surface area and volume of a sphere, discover the golden ratio and relate it to real
life objects, and interpret different data representations.

RATIONALE
A project-based approach to learning math content is valuable and efficient as the
students will solve real-world problems through discovery learning and engineering. There is
a higher level of knowledge retention among students through project-based instruction than

the more traditional lecture approach. A project motivates students to gain knowledge, and
they remember it longer. Projects give students the chance to apply the skills they learn in
school to personally relevant and real-world situations. The students learn skills in PBL such
as how to think critically, solve problems, work in teams, and make presentations. These
skills will help students succeed in the future, both in school and in todays work world. PBL
helps students possess a greater sense of appreciation of mathematics as a tool to describe and
understand the world that they live in. It helps the students draw a clear line between
mathematics and application. Moreover, it gives students the opportunity to joyfully
understand mathematics by working on authentic projects where they will be able to answer a
real-world question. Finally, a project-based, instructional approach is motivating and
inspirational among students, leading to personal success.

CONTENT
The unit project will start out by focusing on platonic solids offering the students to
learn what a vertex (pl. vertices), edges, and faces are. They will use these to learn what
polygons are and eventually the names of the five different platonic shapes, which are cube,
tetrahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron and octahedron. The students will learn about flat vs.
curved faces/polygons, and pentagons and hexagons as two unique polygons. A polygon is a
plane shape (two-dimensional) with straight sides. Examples include triangles, rectangles and
pentagons. A circle is not a polygon because it has a curved side. Regular pentagons and
hexagons have five and six edges with equal lengths, respectively, and each angle has the
same measure, respectively of the two shapes. This symmetry does not exist in irregular
pentagons and hexagons or any other shape with edge degree >/= 3.

The project will have the students discover how distance, velocity, and acceleration
relate by using differentiation and integration, and use functions and graphs to evaluate each
of these. Integration will be introduced as the reverse process to differentiation, and has wide
applications, for example in finding areas under curves and volumes of solids. The students
will learn about the Cartesian plane/coordinate system, similarity and congruence.
A Cartesian coordinate system is a coordinate system that specifies each point uniquely in a
plane by a pair of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances from the point to two
fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length. Two figures are
similar if you can get from one to another through some combinations of translations,
reflections, rotations and dilations (so you can scale up and down). If a figure can flip, shift
and rotate (not resize) to be identical to another figure, then the two figures are congruent.
Then, the students will learn mathematical concepts such as regular polygons,
angles, geometric constructions, hexagons, pentagons, and octagons. A polygon is regular
when all angles are equal and all sides are equal, otherwise the shape would be irregular. The
word construction in geometry has a very specific meaning: the drawing of geometric items
such as lines and circles using only compasses and straightedge or ruler. Very importantly, it
is not allowed to measure angles with a protractor, or measure lengths with a ruler when
constructing geometric figures. Angles measure the span between two legs of a figure. There
are different kinds of angles, including acute angles, which are less than 90 degrees,
complementary angles, which are exactly 90 degrees, obtuse angles, which are between 90
and 180 degrees, and supplementary angles, which are exactly 180 degrees.
This project also includes the surface area and volume of a sphere and the golden ratio,
which is approximately 1.618 that can be found in many real world situations such as
geometry, architecture, anatomy and nature. It will also focus on statistical analyses by

creating and interpreting graph representations. On the same topic, students will work on
averages, i.e., mean, median and mode.

STANDARDS
Standards
M1. Make sense of problems and persevere in
solving them.
Geometry, Congruence, 12, Make formal geometric
constructions with a variety of tools/methods.
S8. Obtain, evaluate & communicate information.
S4. Analyze & interpret data.

Lesson

Lesson

1
X

2
X

Lesson

Lesson

HS-ETS1-2. Design a solution to a complex realworld problem.

Lesson

Lesson

5
X

6
X

Lesson

Lesson

Lesson

Lesson

10

X
X
X

X
X
X

X
X
X

X
X

X
X
X

ASSESSMENTS
The evaluation of nearly all lessons is based on the students journals where they will
record their thoughts about the project, what they have learned, and their questions for me.
The journals will be collected at the end of each lesson and serve both as a formative and
summative assessment. It will be formative in the way that their questions and metacognitive
thinking will be ungraded but give me, as a teacher, an opportunity to hear each individual
students voice in a non-intimidating fashion so that I can work with each individual student
and modify group work accordingly. It will be summative in the way that the questions that
focus directly on taught content on that days lessons will test the students level of attained
knowledge. Observations of individual and group work will also help me form the way I
teach, how I assign individual roles, accommodate struggling learners, etc.
At the end of the project, the students will be graded on their final artifact, their own
soccer ball, a creative poster summarizing the project, and an oral presentation addressing a
set of guiding questions focusing on their ability to effectively convey information and what

this project has taught them to their peers, their ability to work in groups, and their ability to
communicate with an audience. These components are all part of a scoring rubric that will be
used to assess the students work and abilities.