Real Life Triangles

Using Thinglink to Make Triangles Interactive

Triangles don't simply make an appearance in our textbooks, they're in nature, architecture, landmarks, and everyday life. 5th grade students in Mrs. Basinger's class at Hughes Elementary chose different triangles from all areas of life to explore. After learning about the properties and attributes of triangles, students were given the task of finding an image that represents one of their triangle types. Then, they used Thinglink to make their images interactive. They included the type of triangle, definition, properties, and other places that they would find that type of triangle.

Emilie and Celeste both got a lot out of this project. Emilie comments, "I enjoyed getting to chose my own image. I chose my image because it had many different triangles. I thought it would be neat to tag all of the triangles, not just one. I knew that the building I found was in Australia and Googled it to find out that it is called the Sydney Opera House."

Celeste points out, "I chose a piece of wood barbecue I thought it would be interesting. One of the questions we had to answer was 'where else would you see this type of triangle?' My dad uses wood to build things, so I starting thinking this little triangle could be a part of something bigger." She adds, "I enjoyed using Thinglink for this project because everyone came up with something different to show the class. I also noticed that I could label my angles with letters. I had two acute angles so I labeled those both B."

When asked what the most difficult aspect of the project was, Emilie said, "I had to learn how to find and save images. I also learned how to copy and paste the link for my audio comment using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V." Celeste thought that the most challenging part was identifying the name of the sides of the triangle and thinking about other places in life that she would see this type of triangle. 

Emilie concludes, "My image is interesting because most of the shapes in the architecture that I chose were curved. If they were all straight lines it would have been true right triangle. I explained this with text and in an audio comment on my image." Emilie and Celeste using vocaroo to add audio to their image. "I'm going to notice triangles everywhere now," concluded Emilie. 

Hover over Celeste and Emilie's Thinglink Projects: