Geometry Floor Plan Project and a Shout-out!

As we wrap up our final triangle and quadrilateral units, I wanted to get my students started on a project that can last us the rest of the semester.  My idea was a Floor Plan project where students design the floor plan of their dream home as well as incorporating similarity, perimeter, area, and unit cost.  I found and will be borrowing a project already made and shared on TpT (pinned below), because I really like the way the author allows for some creativity on the student's end while still making them bring in knowledge we've covered in class.  Sometimes when I make projects, I try to align them so much to what we've learned that it takes away opportunities from students to be creative.  This TpT project is just phase one of what I have in mind.  I want to keep coming back to our dream homes each time we learn something new.  Here are just a few ideas I have!

• Incorporate perimeter and area of regular polygons by putting in a  hexagonal shaped window in our dream home.
• Incorporate surface area by replacing the floors in our bathrooms, living rooms, kitchens, etc. 
• Incorporate an inquiry based learning activity by asking students if it would cost more to tile our bathroom floor, or use penny's and epoxy to floor our bathroom.

• Incorporate areas of circles by doing this project involving watering our lawn using sprinklers.
• Incorporate volume by figuring out how long it would take for a carbon monoxide leak to fill our house.  I have no ideas or experience on how to do this, it was just a thought.  I'm worried there are too many different variables to make this a true to life project but it was the only thought I currently had involving volume.
• Incorporate surface area again by repainting the interior walls of our house.
• Remodel our kitchen with a pentagonal shaped island which will incorporate features of polygons again.
• Remodel our backyard with a patio, shed, fire pit, etc.  I was thinking you could use circumcenter to find the exact center of our backyard and use that as a location for a patio.  Or you could have students design a triangular shaped patio and make them put a fire pit in the exact center.  Or use incenter to have students create the largest circular fire pit/patio possible in a triangular shaped area.

I could go on for days but these are just a few of the ideas running around in my brain.  Feel free to comment more ideas for myself and other teachers looking to incorporate more projects into their Geometry class.

I would like to thank Justin Coffey, 2016 Kansas Teacher of the Year and Educational Consultant for the Southwest Plains Regional Service Center, for getting these ideas going in my head.  I attended his Making Math Come Alive presentation on February 13th and coming up with project ideas has really cut into my Master's class homework time!  If you want to get inspired, check out the math resources on his website here!