Lesson Plan 4

Objective: Given certain types of information, TSW design a sailboat, describe its construction, and determine approximate production costs.

Materials: Variety of sailing magazines, paper, pencils, crayons, calculators.

Estimated Time: 2-3 days.

Procedures: If students are completely unfumiliar with sailboats, use overhead to introduce a few diagrams. Then, pass out magazines or books and let the students thumb through and ask questions. Have them try to draw two or three sailboats, for practice. While students are doing this, be sure to name important structures, and the materials sometimes used to make them. The next lesson, tell the students that each one owns a boatbuilding company. Give each student a budget, and a price list for materials. Have students draw a boat and label the measurements. Then have them figure out how much of each material they are going to need, and using the price list, how much each item will cost. Help students make adjustments to designs or materials in order to remain within the budget constrictions. They will learn much more if they have to make these adjustments and they don't come out under budget on their first attmept. Limit the choices of materials for simplicity's sake. Students must remain under budget in order for their assignment to be complete. This could be done as a whole group, individual or cooperative group lesson.

Additional activities:

1. Have students come up with an advertisement campaign.

2. Have students take their boat designs outside with a tape measure and draw a full scale picture in the sand, dirt or on an outside basketball court using sidewalk chalk.

3. Be creative and add to the list.

4. Take a field trip to Horizon Boat Builders and compare their attempts to design and plan boat production with real world attempts. The students could present their plans to the builders and get their input.

Lesson plan by Greg Handal

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