Today's Classroom Shoutout goes to Ms. Petermeyer!
My calculus class is beginning to learn about optimization, i.e they are trying to determine the minimum/maximum of something such as finding the minimum amount of plastic to use for a
water bottle given a specific volume, the amount of fencing to maximize the area of a pen given a specific length of the fence, etc. They are taking measurements of two 1-gallon ice cream containers, same brand, same volume, and they will be determining which is going to minimize the amount of plastic used to make the tub. They will also be determining the optimized dimensions for each container (i.e. what dimensions of the current containers actually minimizes the plastic? How do these compare to the actual containers?) They will also compare the amount of space each container takes up, which is preferable when storing/stacking these containers, and the reasonableness of the optimized containers. They will also be constructing these optimized containers.
