3-5 HUB - Caring for Our Community

 

We had special mentors for the project from the Housing and Planning Department at the City of Austin whose work focuses on solutions to homelessness in our city. Students became engineers in this project! They started by interviewing a fictitious homeless client, and then used this research to begin designing a tiny home from cardboard and graph paper. Mathematical skills were a big part of this project! Students were given the range 250-500 square feet as the area of their tiny home. With this constraint the engineers had to calculate their mathematical expression for the dimensions of their house to reach their total area. Students solved for the area and perimeter of the base of their home and some calculated the volume!