text: Article: RMS eighth graders tap into both sides of their brain for math assignment
  RMS eighth graders tap into both sides of their brain for math assignment
  The assignment to build a three-dimensional object was limited only by the eighth graders' imaginations and the kinds of containers they could scrounge from home.
  Cereal, tissue and shoe boxes, toilet and paper towel tubes, oatmeal and cappuccino containers were among the items littering the floor of Molly Smith's math classroom last week. The mess was the result of a real world measurement problem which asked the students to use household items to make a three-dimensional object with three separate shapes.
  Working at tables, their desk, the classroom floor or in the hallway, the students planned what shapes they could tape or glue together for their finished product.
  While several castles were in process, one boy was building a basketball goal using a pizza box as the base and a sphere for the goal and two girls opted to build a yellow robot.
  Maliyah Walls was gluing a coffee tin to a paper towel tube to create a flag and Gage Jesseph was creating a baseball field and scoreboard. Jaiden Seuser chose to use a rectangle, diamond and cylinder to create a "war hammer."
  Jesse Spruell used markers to create a graphic design on the exterior of the boxes he'd selected. When asked what he was making, he replied, "The most dangerous monster from a video game, "a creeper."
  After the construction, students tackled the math phase of the assignment.
  "They'll have to find the surface area and volume of each individual shape and the whole thing," they created and built, Smith said.