Truncated Icosahedron Sculpture Reflection

 Frankly, I am slightly pessimistic about Truncated Icosahedron Sculpture activity. There are definitely benefits to the activity. The major appeal to this activity is that the end product looks cool, and it can be beneficial for the students to develop idea of 3D objects and the relationship between its edges, vertices and sides. However, I see a few reasons why I would not try this in a classroom. First, it requires too much materials that are hard to find. This is not too much of a problem since the CD's can be replaced with other materials, but then it adds on to the second problem which is that it is very time consuming. It took about 23 math teacher candidates more than an hour and a half  to complete the sculpture. If the CD's were to be replaced by other materials it would have took longer. Also assuming that the students will be taking longer time, it would take up at least 2-3 classes to complete this class project. The biggest issue of this project is that it is very difficult to make differentiation for students with different abilities. I can see the students with high abilities leading the coordination, and the students with lower abilities not even reading the instructions and blindly following instructions without developing any mathematical thinking. Also there are parts of this activity where there are literally nothing for majority of the students to do. Even in our class, most people had nothing to do during the last step when less than 5 people were working on putting all the parts together. As a result, I think that this is an activity that could be done as an extracurricular activity such as math club, but would not try to do it in a classroom. 

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