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Architecture STEM: Area and Perimeter City

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Looking for a cool way to incorporate Architecture into a STEM project?  This area and perimeter city brings together science, math, engineering, city planning, maps, and art to make the perfect STEM/STEAM project! And it is SO much fun to create.

STEM Project: Area and Perimeter City

I used to want to be an architect. I think it is an amazing job and have always been fascinated by the work they do. Architects design all of the spaces in which we live, work, and play. They have got to have a ton of knowledge in all of the STEM fields.   Architecture encompasses all aspects of STEM –science, technology, engineering and math, with  art and design thrown in –making it a STEAM career!

How to Make the Area and Perimeter City:

I wanted to try to incorporate all of that into a hands-on project with my kids and so the area and perimeter city was born! This idea cam about when I saw a giant roll of graph paper online. I HAD to have it and knew I could do cool things with it! It has a 1 inch square grid, so it is much larger than regular graph paper. We used the graph paper roll for the whole project.

3-d paper shapes for area and perimeter city

I cut out 3-D shapes from the graph paper. You can see how to make the various 3-D geometric shapes in this post. We made cubes and cuboids of various sizes as well as some pyramids. You can combine shapes to make different ones. For example, we put a pyramid on top of a cube to make a house shape.

geometry city from graph paper

Once the shapes were all cut, we colored and designed them to make all of the different buildings. We taped them together after the designs were finished.

Graph Paper Area, Perimeter & Volume City

We arranged the buildings and drew in some roads. My kids had to have some cars on there as well!

Once the city is assembled, extend this fun project and teach your kids how to solve area, perimeter & volume of the shapes and buildings they have created!  And let them play!

This post is part of the A to Z Guide to Understanding STEM from Little Bins for Little Hands. This massive guide has ideas for teaching STEM for EVERY letter of the alphabet! It is an incredible resource.

Also, check out my STEAM Kids book for even more ideas.

Also check out my book: Math Art & Drawing Games for Kids!

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2 Comments

  1. A wonder project. Inspired by your idea, I used this with a middle school pandemic learning pod math class. I let the students pick task cards such as, “Create a 5-story building with a perimeter of 24 units”, “Create a building with a volume of 128 cubic units” or “Create a building with a 48 square unit footprint”. I had a couple of harder (I thought) task cards, such as “Create a regular octagonal museum with 32 unit perimeter”, but the kids figured these out in a snap. What I hadn’t anticipated with these task cards was all the factoring practice the kids had to do to figure out the various possible designs from which to pick. It was handy to have a long, straight-sided box on hand to help them figure out the orientation of their buildings: Where will the front entrance be? Do you want it to be tall or squat? The box can be rotated to help show them the possibilities.

    Thank you for sharing this creative idea.

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