Life in geometric shapes

Sometimes, teachers have doubts and feel lost about how to bring geometry into the classroom from a more realistic and therefore more meaningful perspective. However, it's not actually that complicated, because in many cases we simply need to look beyond what is immediately apparent. Unfortunately, it's true that we currently live in a primarily digital world where everything moves very fast, and we often move so quickly from one place to another and from one thing to another that we don't stop to notice our surroundings. This also applies to geometry, it's everywhere around us, we just have to look closely. For example, from urban structures to the natural environment. Therefore, making geometry accessible to students is easier than we might imagine. Walking through the city is a daily activity with which we can find geometry everywhere. Therefore, as teachers, a possible task that we could do with our students is to ask them to observe their surroundings while they ar...

In the previous entry, we mentioned the abundant existence of geometric shapes in Ancient Egypt, specifically pyramids. In the case of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, we can also find several geometric forms in architecture.  One of them which is very present in Ancient Greece is the cylinder. This is usually found in the columns of the temples. The Parthenon is an extremely famous temple of Ancient Greece. It is located on the Acropolis of Athens (capital of Greece) and it is dedicated to the goddess of the city, Athenea. Figure 1 Note . The Parthenon The cylinder is a “three-dimensional geometric figure characterized by two identical and parallel bases connected by a continuous curved surface” (Encyclopaedia Britannica, n.d.).  There are different types, although the most typical one is the circular cylinder, which turns out to be the type of cylinder used in the columns of Ancient Greece. As the name itself indicates, a circular cylinder has circles in some parts, the base...

Geometric shapes have been around us for millions of years. In Antiquity, there was already geometry in people’s lives. For instance, in Ancient Egypt, the pyramids are the type of geometric shape that stand out.  “A pyramid is a three dimensional shape made up of flat faces: a polygon base and triangular lateral faces which meet at a point, called the apex” (Third Space Learning, n.d.). According to the shape of the base of the pyramid, we can find different types of them. For example, there are triangular pyramids, square based pyramids, pentagonal ones, hexagonal ones, etc.   Nevertheless, in Egypt a huge number of pyramids have a square as a base. Some of the most famous ones are the pyramids of Giza. They can be covered in Mathematics but also in History lessons as they were built as funerary monuments for pharaohs so they are a great idea to link different subjects, promoting an interdisciplinary education.  Figure 1 Pyramids of Giza Note. Tripadvisor, n.d. For...