Stadium Walls - Texas Instruments TI-73 Teachers Manual

Activity 4

Stadium Walls

Students investigate real-life situations and find
patterns by making concrete representations and
making T-charts. Students then describe and generalize
these patterns verbally, symbolically, and graphically.
Setup
Present the following problem to students.
An engineer designs the skeleton for the walls of a new
stadium from equal lengths of steel beams that are
placed in a rectangular pattern as shown below. The
engineer knows that one wall has to have a length of 57.
How many steel beams are needed for this wall?
(This view is from the front.)
The length of each wall is measured by the number of
beams along the bottom of the wall.
length 1
length 2
length 3
Patterns and Relations
patterning
graphing
evaluating expressions
equivalent math expressions
Materials
graph paper
toothpicks
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