Ritz Cracker Problem, Episode I

Ritz Cracker Problem, Episode I from Andrew Shauver on Vimeo.

If you want to see some discussion on what this lesson looks like when students get their hands on it, check out “Peanut Butter and Cereal: The Unexpected Lesson Plan” 

In geometry class, we almost always talk about cylinders as soup cans, toilet paper rolls, or Pringles containers. That is, a hollow container of some kind. These tend to be good examples because it makes for easy images of the surface area and volume.

But what if the cylinder in question was a stack of congruent circles? How would that change the way we looked at the cylinder?

Better yet, can it help us understand them better so as to be able to move on to bigger things, like composite figures and maybe even calculus!